I call BS, there's not enough room for this sort of detail, you'd get 'as described previously in [1-4, 9, 84, 86, 150-160, unpublished observations]' half of which are unaccessible journals, out of print book chapters, and abstracts in German
I only encountered once, but when it happened I had to realize how old science field may have been different. The exact detail I was looking for should be in [20] … but “[20] to be published” (presumably by the same author). I couldn’t find any papers by author’s name other than that but the author was so sure getting published.
My favorite is recursive bad citations in the method section. As in, citing a paper that cited a previous paper that itself cited a previous paper that cited an abstract with no detailed methodology whatsoever, leaving the true methods a mystery unless you get the senior author to reply to emails.
Bonus points (BPs) for when you get entire sentences full of abbreviations (SFOA). Even more BPs when you get SFOA with abbreviations containing abbreviations within them (SWACAWT). I really hate SWACAWTs.
Add comment