Incorrect Citation Association for Articles in Online-Only Springer Nature Journals
Tam\'as Kriv\'achy

TL;DR
This paper identifies and analyzes a widespread API response error in Springer Nature's online-only journals that causes incorrect citation links, distorting citation metrics and affecting millions of authors since around 2011.
Contribution
It uncovers the root cause of citation distortions in Springer Nature's online journals and validates the issue across multiple literature databases.
Findings
Incorrect references often point to Article Number 1 of a volume.
Top cited articles are disproportionately affected, with some over-cited.
The problem stems from transition issues from page-based to article number-based referencing.
Abstract
We show that citation metrics of journal articles in many of the online-only Springer Nature journals and associated ones are distorted, going back to articles from 2001. We find that most likely due to an API response error, there are many incorrect references which typically lead to Article Number 1 of a given Volume. Among others, the issue affects journals such as Scientific Reports, Nature Communications, Communications journals, Cell Death & Disease, Light: Science & Applications, as well as many BMC, Discovery and npj journals. Beyond the negative effect of introducing incorrect reference information, this distorts the citation statistics of articles in these journals, with a few articles being massively over-cited compared to their peers, while many lose citations; e.g. both in Scientific Reports and in Nature Communications, 5 of the 10 top cited articles have article numbers…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
Topicsscientometrics and bibliometrics research · Academic Publishing and Open Access · Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
