The Noisy Path from Source to Citation [where's the boundary between "loose" and "fraud"?]

The Noisy Path from Source to Citation: Measuring How Scholars Engage with Past Research, Hong Chen, Misha Teplitskiy, David Jurgens, arXiv:2502.20581v2 [cs.CL].

Abstract: Academic citations are widely used for evaluating research and tracing knowledge flows. Such uses typically rely on raw citation counts and neglect variability in citation types. In particular, citations can vary in their fidelity as original knowledge from cited studies may be paraphrased, summarized, or reinterpreted, possibly wrongly, leading to variation in how much information changes from cited to citing paper. In this study, we introduce a computational pipeline to quantify citation fidelity at scale. Using full texts of papers, the pipeline identifies citations in citing papers and the corresponding claims in cited papers, and applies supervised models to measure fidelity at the sentence level. Analyzing a large-scale multi-disciplinary dataset of approximately 13 million citation sentence pairs, we find that citation fidelity is higher when authors cite papers that are 1) more recent and intellectually close, 2) more accessible, and 3) the first author has a lower H-index and the author team is medium-sized. Using a quasi-experiment, we establish the "telephone effect" - when citing papers have low fidelity to the original claim, future papers that cite the citing paper and the original have lower fidelity to the original. Our work reveals systematic differences in citation fidelity, underscoring the limitations of analyses that rely on citation quantity alone and the potential for distortion of evidence.

Why am I not surprised? 

And then we have the medical community, where it seems not uncommon for a physician to get their name on a clincal study if they've burped or farted within ten yards of a patient included in a study. That's how these guys rack up CVs with 100s of citations. If you had to live or die by your favorite dozen papers, how many could produce a dozen distinctly different papers (for some interesting definition of "distinctly different")?