Douglas Kell has written a couple of interesting blog posts on the topic of citations.

What’s in a name? Guest, ghost, and indeed quite imaginary authorships reviews some of the main horrors which we have discussed in this forum, ending with some comments about semantic-matching technologies.

The Matthew Effect in Science: Citing the Most Cited describes a tendency for people to cite papers that everyone else cites – because they are good, or because everyone else is citing them? The post concludes: “Modern Web-based data mining tools and databases allow one to find the duplication of scientific (textual) content in papers fairly easily. Scientists citing papers they have not read might do well to remember this. Out of cite, out of mined, one might say [ahem].”