Scientists' Citation Misbehavior Reflected By The Wrong Citation Records

This topic comes from my supervisor's unexpected discovery in the process of retrieving data for the project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI for short) database, constructed by the American Institute for Scientific Information, is one of the most important data source for scientometircs. When using the data covered by SCI to analyze the citation of Nature, the international famous journal in science, we found a most highly cited paper published in 1970 and authored by Laemmli, which has been cited more than 190,000 times. To our surprise, there are as many as 4133 wrong citation records belonging to 517 wrong citation types. The wrong citation type of low frequency could be explained by scientists' carelessness. However, carelessness is not the reason for frequently repeating an error. What leads to the abnormity of the frequency of wrong citations? We speculated it is scientists' citation misbehavior: copying references from other articles' reference list without reading original articles. The large-scale set of wrong citations received by Laemmli's article is an excellent sample for us to study scientists' citation misbehavior.In this thesis, we use scientometric methods, such as citation network analysis, to study the wrong citation records of Laemmli's article. Some results are as follows:·It is the scientists' citation misbehavior that produces so many wrong citation types and wrong citation records.·The mainly citation misbehavior reflected by the wrong citation records are citation copying and citing without noting.·Citation misbehavior ruins the order of science recognition, influences scientific communication and harms the benefit of the scientific community. Scientists and journal editors should pay special attention to the problem of citation misbehavior.