Editing Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis (section)

== Citation Laundering ==

This kind of circular referencing is not feasible when all references are to other papers because of the fact that papers move only forward in time. In fact, given scientific papers that only reference other scientific papers, one can hope to trace the source of one mistake or the other back to its origin.

But another novel method of citogenesis exists: to reference a newspaper or magazine that does not reference its sources. By doing this, one can take a specific number one wishes to seem scientific, see it published in some magazine, then use a network of papers to launder that into a scientific reference.

This has particular strength now that a lot of people have access to Google and can speak the language of scientists: "citation" / "reference" / "source" and so on.