“Propagation of Mistakes in Papers”, Thomas Neumann2018-06-08 (scientific bias; backlinks)⁠:

While reading papers on cardinality estimation I noticed something odd: The seminal paper by Flajolet & Martin1985 on probabilistic counting gives a bias correction constant as 0.77351, while a more recent (and very useful) paper by Scheuermann & Mauve2007 gives the constant as 0.775351.

…I started searching, and there is a large number of papers that uses the value 0.775351, but there is also a number of papers that uses the value 0.77351. Judging by the number of Google hits for “Flajolet 0.77351” vs. “Flajolet 0.775351” the 0.77351 group seems to be somewhat larger, but both camps have a substantial number of publications.

…why do so many paper use the incorrect value 0.775351 then? My guess is that at some point somebody made a typo while writing a paper, introducing the superfluous digit 5, and that all other authors copied the constant from that paper without re-checking its value. I am not 100% sure what the origin of the mistake is. The incorrect value seems to appear first in the year 2007, showing up in multiple publications from that year. Judging by publication date the source seems to be this paper (also it did not cite any other papers with the incorrect value, as far as I know). And everybody else just copied the constant from somewhere else, propagating it from paper to paper.

See Also:

• Stochastic modeling of citation slips

• The Citation Bias: Fad and Fashion in the Judgment and Decision Literature

• The Power of Bias in Economics Research

• Statistics as Rhetoric in Psychology

• A mathematical theory of citing

• Copied citations create renowned papers?

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