Last summer, Peter Degen's postdoctoral supervisor came to him with an unusual problem: One of his papers was being cited too much. Citations are the currency of academia, but there was something unusual about these. Published in 2017, the paper had assessed the accuracy of a particular type of statistical analysis on epidemiological data and had received a respectable few dozen citations in other research papers over the years, but now it was being referenced every few days, hundreds of times, placing it among the most cited papers of his career. Another professor might be thrilled. Degen's adviser asked him to investigate.
Degen, a postd …