How often do authors not read their cites? This might seem near-impossible to answer, but bibliographic analysis offers a cute trick. In olden times, citations and bibliographies had to be compiled by hand; this is an error-prone process, but one may make a different error from another author citing the same paper, and one might correct any error on reading the original. On the other hand, if you cite a paper because you blindly copied the citation from another paper and never get around to reading it, you may introduce additional errors but you definitely won’t fix any error in what you copied. So one can get an idea of how frequent non-reads are by tracing lineages of bibliographic errors: the more people copy around the same wrong version of a citation (out of the total set of citations for that cite), the fewer of them must be actually reading it.

Such copied errors turn out to be quite common and represent a large fraction of citations, and thus suggests that many papers are being cited without being read.

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