Academics cite work ‘they don’t know particularly well’

There are cases that all journal publishers can point to where ‘cut and paste’, even in pre-electronic days, has led to the same errors from earlier papers (date, volume and issue numbers, page numbers, titling and author name typos etc) being replicated in later citations. There is a culture of ‘literature review ‘ and referencing ‘the key thinkers’ that seems to drive this. Did the survey cover any of this?

The paper is interesting and useful, although at its core it sets up a false dichotomy between "normative" and "social constructivist" models, providing evidence against the former but no positive evidence for the latter. It would, I think, have been better to leave it as a criticism of the normative model, and stopping there where the evidence ran out. Additionally, influence on "research choices" would not be the sole reason for citing a paper even by a (slightly broader) normative model, so the results here are highly dependent on the authors' chosen definitions - are these arbitrary? Finally, since it's a pilot, the weak p < 0.1is fine (and surely does tell us something about how scientists evaluate papers) - it will be interesting to see the follow-up.