I’m a passionate scientist. Science is a way for me to show love and care for the things that matter to me. A way to express my love for nature, the one I learned to love and respect in my homeland.
Therefore, I care about my research. Deeply, truly. I do not pursue success itself, as normally considered by societal standards; luckily, I don’t need it. Anyway, I consider myself successful, even if that seems odd for many colleagues who look suspiciously at my “numbers”, or recruitment commissions that had rejected more than 100 of my job and research applications[1]. Many of them, not even with a nice rejection letter.
As I care about my research, I like to look at the way my work is cited. Beyond the interesting angles of my unorthodox scientific vision, is rare to find citations used in the sense of substance. Normally, the citations are because I did this work here or there, or on this or that topic, a keyword-matching exercise that shows my paper wasn’t really read. Fair enough. But what I learned from this exercise is more worrisome than any personal self-confirmation. It is what I learned to know as “misattribution”. It goes like this: you read the paragraph where your paper is cited, and you realise that your findings do not support, in any sense, what the authors of that paper are saying.
What can you do in such situations? Should I send an email to the authors, the journal, or the editor who accepted the paper? Honestly, there is no way to proceed in these cases. There are no clear mechanisms.
The most striking misattribution I found occurred to me while acting as an editor: I wrote to the authors, noting that some important research on the topic was missing from their reference list. The revised version included a couple of my papers that didn’t fit the topic at all. I was trained as an editor by a best-in-class founding editor, who taught me not only content-wise to understand the ecological foundations of ecosystem services science, but also on the ethical implications of being the “gatekeeper”, as he liked to call himself. So what I did was an automatic reaction. I sent the paper back to the authors, asking them to correct the misattributed citations to my work. They did, and the manuscript moved on.
I tried to understand the reasons they hold for doing that. Was it unintentional? Was there a way to show that they like my work? Were they trying to buy me with a couple of citations? More importantly, have they read my papers before citing them? The answer to this last question is clearly not.
Science is done on the basis of what others have done before. Here are some giants of our time. I had the honour and privilege to know in person.
The issue of misattribution has reached unprecedented volume. Is everywhere. And now, with an AI capable of sophisticated lies, it is becoming even worse. The truth is, the pace of scientific production is accelerating, and we have less and less time to read. To understand the scientific contribution made by others. We confine ourselves to very narrow research compartments, eager to publish as soon as possible, while reading becomes a burden. This year, during my annual publishing PhD workshop, I asked PhD students how many papers they had read this week. They laughed nervously. What about this month? Now they laugh louder, because they didn’t read much. They were just too busy doing research.
Understanding others’ findings is fundamental to science. Is the only way, yes, the only way to know if I’m doing innovative research. But how can we do that when the whole system is pushing us hard to produce more and more stuff, to provide findings to solve important societal problems, and is operating under very tight funding schemes that treat literature reviews as a waste of time? Why care, if the problem to be solved is already described in the call for projects?
[1] I promise myself I will write about rejection in academia soon.