Citation laundering
Passing a claim through a chain of intermediaries, a report, a news story, a speech, a citation, until it acquires a respectable source that conceals where it started.
A claim from an interested party is discounted. The same claim cited to a newspaper, a journal, or an official report is not. Citation laundering builds the chain: the industry funds a study, the study is summarized by a think tank, the summary is reported by a newspaper, the newspaper is cited by a legislator, and the legislator's statement is quoted as the government's view. At each step the origin drops away. By the end, the claim has a clean source and no one remembers who paid for it.
The medical form is ghostwriting: articles drafted by a company's writers and published under academic names, then cited by the company as independent evidence. The digital form is circular: a claim inserted into a reference work, cited by a news story, which becomes the reference work's citation. Exploits Authority Bias and Illusory Truth Effect.
Historical examples
Documents disclosed in litigation over the painkiller rofecoxib (Vioxx) showed that Merck employees or contractors drafted clinical and review articles that were then published under the names of academic authors, some of whom were recruited after the manuscript was written. The articles were cited as independent evidence of the drug's safety. The analysis appeared in JAMA in 2008.
Ross, Joseph S., Kevin P. Hill, David S. Egilman, and Harlan M. Krumholz. "Guest Authorship and Ghostwriting in Publications Related to Rofecoxib." JAMA 299, no. 15 (2008): 1800–1812. Source
The "Oregon Petition," a mailing that gathered signatures against the Kyoto Protocol, was accompanied by a paper formatted to resemble a reprint from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which prompted the Academy to issue a public statement that the paper had not been published by it and did not reflect its views. The petition's signature count was thereafter cited for years as scientific opposition.
National Academy of Sciences. "Statement by the Council of the National Academy of Sciences Regarding Global Change Petition." 20 April 1998; Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
In advertising and commerce
"Citogenesis," the cartoonist Randall Munroe's name for it, describes a claim added to a reference article without a source, picked up by a journalist who cites the reference, and then sourced in the reference to the journalist's article. Documented cases include invented nicknames and biographical details that circulated for years on the strength of the loop.
Munroe, Randall. "Citogenesis." xkcd no. 978, 2011; Harrison, Stephen. "The Wikipedia Citogenesis Problem." Slate, 2019, on documented cases.
Pick a statistic from a news article that cites a report. Find the report. What does the report cite? Keep going. Where does the number actually come from?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
The minister cited "a study in a leading journal"; the study's authorship line credits a medical writer employed by the manufacturer.
What to notice. A funded claim wearing an academic byline, cited as independent evidence.
The "80% of experts" figure appears in four news outlets, each citing another; the first cites a trade association's survey of its own members.
What to notice. A chain of citations that hides an interested origin.
The encyclopedia entry cites a newspaper article that cites the encyclopedia entry.
What to notice. Circular sourcing: the claim's only support is itself.
Sources
- Ross, Joseph S., et al. "Guest Authorship and Ghostwriting in Publications Related to Rofecoxib." JAMA 299, no. 15 (2008): 1800–1812. doi:10.1001/jama.299.15.1800
- Sismondo, Sergio. Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma's Invisible Hands. Manchester: Mattering Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0995527775
- Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. ISBN 978-1596916104