Incorrect Citation Association for Articles in Online-Only Springer Nature Journals
2025/11/03 by Tamás Kriváchy, Kriváchy, Tamás · 12 voices
Decision Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #cs.DL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.01675
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 of 1. We validate the distorted statistics by assessing data from multiple scientific literature databases: Crossref, OpenCitations, Semantic Scholar, and the journals' websites. The issue primarily arises from the inconsistent transition from page-based referencing of articles to article number-based referencing, as well as the improper handling of the change in the publisher's article metadata API. It seems that the most pressing problem has been present since approximately 2011, which we estimate affects the citation count of millions of authors.
Discussions
- Oops. Ooooooooooooops. I do hope that nobody has been given or denied a job/promotion based on their SpringerNature citation counts in the past 15 years. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 h/t @nathlarigaldie.b [bsky, 187 points, 6 comments]
- Apparently an engineering issue with Springer Nature platform is inflating citations for their online journal articles through circular citation links. They were informed by the preprint authors month [bsky, 9 points, 1 comments]
- If you wrote the first article in a volume in a Springer Nature journal, congratulations - you won the lottery! You're getting credit for citations to all the papers in that volume! 🤪 arxiv.org/abs/2 [bsky, 8 points, 3 comments]
- Great sleuthing by @krivachytamas.bsky.social - a broken Springer API causes referencing chaos. Read the thread (and/or) their paper at arxiv.org/abs/2511.01675 [bsky, 3 points, 0 comments]
- Incorrect Citation Association for Articles in Online Springer Nature Journals [hn, 2 points, 0 comments]
- I just learned this jaw-dropping fact: Article #1 of a volume tends to get unusually more citations in SN online-only journals because of system errors Great work and presentation by Tamas Krivachy @ [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
- Springer Nature journals failed to assign references correctly in many articles, incorrectly linking to the first article of the volume, thus misleading citation statis. Researchers pay up to €10,000 [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
- Yes, I think it's because of how Scientific Reports and other SN journals number their articles. This preprint came out the other day about it: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675. Article 1 in the year is given [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
- UPDATED Preprint: Incorrect Citation Association for Articles in Online-Only Springer Nature Journals (via #arXiv) arxiv.org/abs/2511.01675 #scholcomm #publishers #journals [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
- It’s good to know that at least the outrageous fees are being spent to provide the best infrastructure arxiv.org/abs/2511.01675 [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
- There will be more papers like this for somewhat similar reasons (not all is papermill adjacent though). See e.g. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
- Plot source: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
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