Bug in Springer Nature may be causing 'significant, systemic' citation inflation
10 days ago
- #research-metrics
- #citation-distortion
- #academic-publishing
- Springer Nature's metadata handling flaws have led to distorted citation counts, affecting millions of researchers.
- Citations are incorrectly attributed to the first paper in a journal volume, benefiting some authors unfairly.
- The issue impacts online-only titles like Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, and BMC journals.
- Tens of thousands of authors gained citations, while millions lost them, without any fault of their own.
- The problem affects journal websites and free citation databases like Crossref, OpenCitations, and Google Scholar.
- Distorted citations could mislead funding decisions, promotions, and university rankings.
- Experts warn the issue may extend to curated databases like Scopus and Web of Science.
- A Nature Communications paper from 2018 incorrectly received over 7,000 citations due to this bug.
- Authors have tried unsuccessfully to correct these errors, with publishers blaming citing journals or AI.
- The problem stems from the shift to article-number-based referencing in online journals.
- Springer Nature disputes the preprint's conclusions, calling them potentially misleading due to incomplete data.
- Experts argue the damage is irreversible, as high citation counts attract even more citations (Matthew Effect).
- The incident highlights broader vulnerabilities in citation data exchange and standardization across publishers.
- Calls for abandoning blind faith in quantitative metrics to prevent further corruption in science.