While Tamás Kriváchy was working toward the publication of one of his papers, he discovered that a reference he had included was incorrect. Upon further investigation, Kriváchy, a physicist with the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, found that he had provided the journal with a faulty reference. This was particularly alarming as it involved one of his own papers, which he had previously cited in several other works.
Ultimately, he traced the problem to what he believes is the original source of the error: the bibliography of a journal article released by Springer Nature.
Upon thorough examination, Kriváchy realized that when he downloaded metadata from the Springer Nature site for any of its online-only journals, the publisher’s system incorrectly placed the article number in the field meant for page numbers, designating it as the first issue. However, the underlying cause of the issue may be more complex.
Misunderstanding of article numbers
As Kriváchy points out, online-only journals do not possess page numbers. In contrast, article numbers indicate the sequence in which papers are published within a journal’s volume; for instance, article number 1 is the first article in that volume. ‘This issue one is actually misinterpreted as an article number,’ he states. Kriváchy believes this indicates that the first articles in each volume may be receiving an exaggerated number of citations.
He decided to perform an analysis to determine if this was indeed the situation. His analysis, published as an unreviewed preprint on arXiv, assessed the citation trends of three online-only Springer Nature journals: Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, and BMC Public Health.
Upon comparing the initial articles of the last 25 volumes published by these three journals to similarly aged papers within those same journals, Kriváchy claims he discovered that they ‘consistently outperform their peers substantially in terms of citation count and references received’.
His analysis revealed that every single first article in all 25 volumes published by the three journals collectively garners more citations than the average count of citations for manuscripts released by the same journals around the same period.
Among the top articles in Scientific Reports and Nature Communications, five out of the ten most cited papers were the initial articles of their respective volumes, the study revealed. ‘Article ones are being referred to far more frequently than they should be,’ Kriváchy asserts.
Citations inflated by mistakes
Due to these citation errors, articles that reference article ones often address entirely unrelated subjects and fields, Kriváchy observes. ‘I’m just surprised this issue hasn’t been identified until now,’ he remarks.
Kriváchy cautions that the problem could lead to multiple consequences. He highlights that researchers may struggle to locate pertinent scientific literature—and papers that reference their own work—if the references in bibliographies are flawed.
Moreover, some articles are experiencing artificial inflation in their citation counts—and metrics reliant on them—due to a technical glitch, Kriváchy notes, providing an unfair advantage to some scholars when seeking grants or higher faculty positions.
Kriváchy suspects this issue could influence all Springer Nature journals that utilize article numbers in place of page numbers. In comparing his findings to journals from other publishers, he did not observe the same problem.
Even if the issue is resolved completely, ‘we’ll continue to see citation counts for article number one outperforming the others for quite some time due to this accumulation and their popularity,’ Kriváchy points out.
‘We take all claims regarding erroneous data seriously—especially when they pertain to information crucial to our authors,’ states a representative for Springer Nature, adding that the publisher is investigating the situation. ‘Examining the conclusions, we suspect they could be misleading because of incomplete data.’
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