Comment Fatal Flaw in Logic (Score 1) 351
While it is possible the propogated citation errors found in this study might occasionally measure the extreme ethical flaw of not reading the paper, there is another scenario that could account for the propogated citation errors. The authors acknowledge, in principal, that "one can argue that an author might copy a citation from an unreliable reference list, but still read the paper". I would argue that in practice, the second scenario of relying on a potentially unrealable reference list is exactly that is the most common cause for the propogated citation errors they measured.
It is very likely that if you are in a research field for a while that there are many papers that you read and understood months or years before a you write a paper on a related topic. Every good scientist I know that has worked in a field for awhile can remember a lot of papers by authors, journals, titles, approximate time of publication or some combination of these attributes, but I do not know many that can remember exact citations.
What could very well explain a majority of the propogating citation errors is that--in the crush of writing on deadline--they simply relied on the bibliography of a few papers to fill in some citation details of other papers they already knew of. What probably often happens is that some scientists relied on the bibliography sections of a few papers to extract the exact bibliographical references of more papers that they had read at some earlier time. This second scenario is, I feel, the more likely. It is probably poor scholarship and certainly poor editing, but it in no way rises to the level of scientific misconduct and lack of reading of the cited papers implied in this study.
This study does measure some unfortunate sloppiness in citations, but the premise does not hold, I feel, that what it measures the failure to read the cited papers.
(Orignal paper at http://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0212/0212043
