The tale of the phantom reference

 I came across a really interesting article on the Internet last week ("The mystery of the phantom reference" by Anne-Wil Harzing).  The article is about a scientific reference to an article that appears on the publisher, Elsevier's website under the author guidelines:

Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J.A.J., Lupton, R.A., 2000.  The art of writing a scientific article.  J Sci Commun. 163 (2) 51-59.

Just to check out the article, I looked up the reference on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed website.  Nothing.  Occasionally, I've found that references cited in textbook chapters or research articles aren't always correct.  So, I did what I always do in these cases, I looked up the first author.  Nothing.  There are six articles under the author "Van der Geer J" - not one of them refers to anything remotely close to an article on "scientific writing." 

The reason is fairly simple.  The article does not exist.  The kind folks at Elsevier were merely providing an example of how they wanted prospective authors submitting manuscripts to their journals to format their bibliographies.  

Here's the interesting part.  There are apparently almost 400 articles that cite this article in the Web of Science catalog!  Even more citing articles are found in Google Scholar!  The problem here seems clear.  There are authors who are citing this article without necessarily looking at what it says - if they had done so, they would have been unable to find the article itself.  The lesson here - always check your references!

If I were to be completely honest, I haven't alway read through all of the articles I've cited in a manuscript or textbook chapter, but I have at least looked at the abstract.  I have always tried to be careful to be inclusive when citing others' works, while at the same time trying to avoid creating a reference list that is too long.  The physical act of going through each abstract has certainly helped in this regard.

I would also wonder what checks there are for the editorial staffs of journals.  As Anne-Wil Harzing found out upon further investigation, a number of the articles that cited the "phantom reference" were either conference proceedings or articles in low-quality journals.  That certainly begs the question - do we have too many journals now?  Perhaps this would also be a good time to revisit the academic credo of "publish or perish"?  Surely there are better ways of looking at academic productivity in the new Information Age?  

The tale of the phantom reference is an interesting anecdote, a cautious reminder to "always check your references", and perhaps an admonition for academia to revisit the "publish or perish" mindset.