2023 VOLUME 3 ISSUE 2
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Dissemination network of referencing errors: A comparison between the two most cited papers in the world
AUTHOR
Liming Liang, Zhen Zhong
ABSTRACT
Lowry's paper (1951, Journal of Biological Chemistry) is the most highly cited paper in the world up to 26th, December 2022. Laemmli's paper (1970, Nature) ranks second. These two papers are selected as our sample to compare respective dissemination networks of referencing errors. There are several types of referencing errors, and we focus on the so-called "double error", that is, the co-occurrence of a wrong volume number of a journal and a wrong beginning page number of a paper. Since the probability of a double error is extremely small, so that whenever double error occurs more than once, we can deduce definitely that there are some authors who copy references from the reference list of other publications. Based on the dissemination networks of the double errors of the above-mentioned two papers, three dissemination routes are confirmed. Route 1: copying references from another paper and citing that paper. Route 2: copying references from another paper without citing that paper. Route 3: Sharing at least one author with another paper which carries the same referencing error. Some suggestions are offered to reduce or eliminate the misconduct of copying references without any checking.
KEYWORDS
Referencing errors; Dissemination network; Citing-cited relation; Reference copying without check