Here’s a mystery: How did a nonexistent paper rack up hundreds of citations? Pieter Kroonenberg, an emeritus professor of statistics at Leiden University in The Netherlands, was puzzled when he tried to locate a paper about academic writing and discovered the article didn’t exist. In fact, the journal—Journal of Science Communications—also didn’t exist. Perhaps Kroonenberg’s … Continue reading The “phantom reference:” How a made-up article got almost 400 citations