<
https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/tracing-the-social-half-life-of-a-zombie-citation/>
"Academic publishing is currently experiencing a viral spread of “zombie
citations.” This term refers to references of academic publications that do not
exist. They are not papers or books that exist in the usual sense as fully
authored publications, but only as titles that are mentioned and credited in
other publications. They are “undead” in the zombie sense, since they fall
between the living and the deceased. Yet these zombie citations shamble on with
a certain half-life of their own.
Zombie citations is a term originally used to describe the persistence of
references to retracted scientific publications, but at the current time the
term is also used to refer to citations that may have been “hallucinated” or
constructed by generative AI, often if an author has used such technology to
help write their own paper or compile its references.
Late last year I found a zombie reference to a paper I had not written. As an
editor of an academic journal I’ve become a little frustrated by authors
submitting papers with obviously incorrect references. It’s something we can
tell especially easily if an author references a paper by one of the editors,
and we can instantly identify it as non-existent. In the case last December, an
author had referenced the following:
Williamson, B. (2021). Education governance and datafication.
European
Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 279–296.
Well, I have published in that journal, and “education,” “governance,” and
“datafication” are all topics I research and write about, but I never wrote
that. (Let’s put to one side for a moment how ill-advised it is to submit a
paper to a journal which cites a non-existent paper by one of the editors,
which is bound to result in those editors being both the first and last readers
of that manuscript.) Curious whether “Education governance and datafication”
appeared anywhere else, I did a little Google search just to see if I could
track down the source. Here’s what I first found online:
Williamson, B. and Piattoeva, N. (2022) Education Governance and Datafication.
Education and Information Technologies, 27, 3515-3531.
Same title, but different authorship and a different journal. I
have written
with Nelli Piattoeva, but not for that journal, and that’s still not a paper we
wrote or published anywhere. OK, so next stop was Google Scholar. That’s when
things went Zombieland."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Cybersecurity: February 10, 2026
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-10-150379364
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
