Even Real Citations Can Stink
A preprint on bogus citations has at least one highly questionable real citation
Cureus is a journal that had a hot minute of fame when acquired by Springer Nature in 2022. Since then, it has been a consistent problem — its “Wall of Shame” was taken down after legitimate critiques showed it to be unjust; it has been a target of paper mills; it has been a target of grifters seeking to boost SEO scores; its review times are ridiculously short; and it has suffered retraction after retraction, which seems like a flesh wound given how the reviewers and editors seem to barely look over the papers they publish for money.
Cureus finally took one to the solar plexus when it was delisted and lost its Impact Factor in 2025.
This month’s hot commodity is something seemingly unrelated — papers finding reference lists littered with bogus citations. There have been so many of these my head is spinning, but I finally found time to give one a closer look.
A recent preprint on arXiv covered in Nature and chatted up repeatedly on social media claims to have found non-existent citations across repositories like SSRN and bioRxiv.
It’s a study mixing apples (SSRN), oranges (bioRxiv), and fruit salad (PubMed Central) while missing out on the rest of the nuts for sale in our current roadside bazaar (medRxiv, Zenodo, Preprints.org, etc.).
Most significantly, the claim is completely unsurprising (and actually rather boring) for those of who have been paying attention.
It’s like saying you found dust in a sawmill after you disconnected the air safety equipment. Who could have predicted? (Hint: Lots of people.)
However, the preprint has one virtue nobody has talked about — it does remind us that not all accurately linked citations are created equal, and some are a hot mess.