Millions of researchers could be affected by a "dramatic distortion of citation counts" likely caused by flaws in how the academic publishing giant Springer Nature handles article metadata, according to a new preprint. The bug means a large number of citations are automatically attributed to the first paper in a given journal volume, instead of to whichever paper in that volume they were intended for. The issue appears to affect many of the publisher’s online-only titles, such as Nature Communications, Scientific Reports and several BMC journals.

The preprint highlights a paper designated as "Article number 1" in the 2018 volume of Nature Communications, "Structural absorption by barbule microstructures of super black bird of paradise feathers". The work has garnered more than 7,000 citations, according to the journal’s website, and Crossref, OpenCitations and Semantic Scholar provide comparable numbers. Meanwhile, Google Scholar lists 584 citing papers as of this writing, Clarivate’s Web of Science 582, and Scopus 1,323.

The corresponding author of that paper, Dakota McCoy of the University of Chicago, contacted Nature Communications in April, 2025, stating her paper was "frequently cited spuriously". An editorial assistant supervisor for the journal replied: "I am afraid that we are unable to determine any steps we are able to take to resolve the issue on our side as it looks as if no errors occurred on the original publication of the paper". They speculated the issue may have come from the citing journal, was a citation error that kept getting propagated, or was somehow being influenced by AI.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/11/11/bug-in-springer-nature-metadata-may-be-causing-significant-systemic-citation-inflation/

Another high-profile case has interested scientists. Read now