Pieter Kroonenberg, an emeritus professor of statistics at Leiden University in The Netherlands, was puzzled when he tried to locate a paper about academic writing and discovered the article didn’t exist. In fact, the journal – Journal of Science Communications – also didn’t exist. Perhaps Kroonenberg’s most bizarre discovery was that this made-up paper, "The art of writing a scientific article," had somehow been cited almost 400 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
The article appeared to be completely made up and did not in fact exist. It was a "phantom reference" that had been created merely to illustrate Elsevier’s desired reference format. Nearly 90% of the citations were for conference proceedings papers, and nearly two-thirds of these appeared in Procedia conference volumes, which are published by Elsevier.
Although 400 citations sounds significant, out of nearly 85,000 Procedia conference papers, the phantom reference appeared in less than 0.5% of articles. Whilst unfortunate, one might consider this to be an acceptable ‘margin of error’.
More: https://retractionwatch.com/2017/11/14/phantom-reference-made-article-got-almost-400-citations/
