Weird R reference

[u/mapachito_chatarrero]

Hi,

A paper I'm coauthoring (but I'm not the main writer) has been approved and I was doing some final checks before publication. Then I realized that, somehow, we had a weird reference to R:

Wilson A, Norden N. The R Project for Statistical Computing The R Project for Statistical Computing. URL Http//Www r-Project Org/254 2015;3:1–9.

Clearly, this is not R's preferred citation (and the one I added to the word document)

R Core Team (2026). _R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing_.
R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.

Checking back previous versions of the document, this reference change happened somewhere between November 2025 and January 2026. I don't know how or why my coauthor's Mendeley or Copilot sharted this reference.

However, digging deeper into this, it seems to be a pretty common issue, with plenty of papers using that citation, going back at least to 2022:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Wilson+A%22+%22Norden+N%22

Yet, what's more, there are no Wilson nor Norden among R's contributors: https://www.r-project.org/contributors.html

What the hell is this reference, and why does it show up in reference managers?

[u/shadowyams]

I was going to suggest AI hallucination, but according to a ChatGPT search, this error dates back to at least 2017 from this Masters thesis:

Mendes, Diogo António da Fonseca. (2017). Análise Prescritiva do Desempenho de Equipamentos de Redes**. Master’s thesis, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. September 2017.**

pdf link at: https://run.unl.pt/server/api/core/bitstreams/772cd871-9e1a-4e0c-885f-ea351f54bd04/content?utm_source=chatgpt.com

I downloaded and verified that ref 30 is this mangled R citation:

A. Wilson and N. Norden, “The R Project for Statistical Computing The R Project for Statistical Computing,” vol. 3. 2015.

So probably some corrupted citation manager entry a decade ago that has gotten propagated into a ton of papers.

[u/mapachito_chatarrero → u/shadowyams]

I've found a similar entry in Mendeley, ranked #2 by relevance when searching for "R" "statistical computing" "r-project"

https://www.mendeley.com/search/?page=1&query=%22R%22%20%22statistical%20computing%22%20%22r-project%22&sortBy=relevance

It probably has to do with journal citation formats forcing people to add R's url to the ref's title and it spiraled from there.

[u/wdebakker → u/shadowyams]

Amazing, nice find!

[u/InformationOk3503 → u/shadowyams]

I was going to suggest it was an AI problem so I looked at it by AI 

[u/millig]

Strange mystery! I have no idea where it comes from but I found a CV for an Adam Wilson (https://yale.academia.edu/AdamWilson/CurriculumVitae) that has this under the Conference presentations, seminars, & posters heading:

1. Wilson, A. M., N. Norden. (2008, March). The R Project for Statistical Computing: Don’t be scared! Presentation at the University of Connecticut Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Student Symposium.

No idea why it would have been changed to 2015 at some point or why the subtitle was dropped and turned into the definitive R citation though! Maybe an AI hallucination that was picked up by other AIs being used to write papers? Also strange where the ghost URL to the R-Project website came from!

[u/CommonFiveLinedSkink → u/millig]

WHATTT? My department's grad symposium somehow caused this citation ghost?? 

Y'all our grad symposium high key slaps, though, so I say just cite this, too, there's no reason to be scared. 

[u/wateronthebrain]

I don't really understand why you'd reference a programming language. Would you reference Python or C? To me it feels like referencing ANOVA or something.

[u/dr-tectonic → u/wateronthebrain]

The motivation is two-fold: to make the research fully reproducible, by giving the reader all the information about the methods you used, including the exact implementation, and to treat data and software as first-class research products, on par with publications, worthy of citation, not just acknowledgement.

For the former, you should cite any specialized packages or libraries you used; the difference between R and C/Python is that in R, a lot of important methods are implemented in the core of the language.

How important you think the latter is varies by discipline, but there are many fields where software and datasets are absolutely vital contributions to the scientific enterprise, and the community has come to realize that you don't want to make people choose between making those contributions and furthering their careers by only counting journal articles in your performance metrics.

[u/sunoukong → u/wateronthebrain]

Adding to the other replies, it might be helpful for the team maintaining the language to show the "impact" of their work to secure grant funding and whatnot. Citations are a way to provide that, and it has no cost for authors so why not support them that way.

[u/marmotshoes → u/wateronthebrain]

At my company we cite the version of R and all packages used for analysis. This is to ensure reproducibility for critics and supporters alike.

[u/Pilus91 → u/wateronthebrain]

You specify the version

[u/FalconX88 → u/wateronthebrain]

some fields are weird like that, they reference standard methods that are around for decades and part of textbooks, or software like that.