Never thought about that, but I guess you could easily create circular reasoning with two or more publications citing each other?
Why do it with two? The Daily Wire cites their own stories all the time as evidence something is happening.
Not necessarily, however, I've been down a shocking number of citation threads where the thing being ciit d actually never exists.
It's like 2-3 publications deep and thread ends at "unpublished data/ results" or, like it's just a lie and they never did the thing the author 2-3 orders removed is claiming they did. Or something's it's an unfounded conclusion or assertion made in the discussion.
Those are super frustrating.
I’m not like… in research or anything, but as a science communicator I really like to understand some of the nuanced stuff that I’m telling people about, and those dead ends are really frustrating because everything sort of hinges on that, doesn’t it? If that blank space is filled by something else the conclusion probably changes.. and that means the way I can talk about it has to change.
I could imagine it being much worse for someone who is publishing or working on a paper for publication. Especially when a lot of people don’t dive that deep and just accept it because the peer review process seems to have also.
You’d need a few more papers deep just in case someone started snooping around I feel. Maybe 5 or 6
Publish date would be hard, since you can't cite a paper from the future, and for most reputable journals you citing anything non-peer-reviewed would raise a lot of eyebrows
The ultimate sovereign citizen
