GhostCite's own root-cause trace for its most-repeated citation error points to a shared tool, not reader-to-reader copying

citation-analysiscitation-copyingcitation-error-propagationghostcitebridge-audit

GhostCite's headline propagation finding — that citation errors spread paper-to-paper — rests on one traced chain plus a repeat-count table; the authors are explicit that this is a single worked case ("We even traced one clear propagation path...") generalized only as a hedge ("these viral errors suggest that researchers may be copying citations"). For the single largest repeat in that table — an erroneous "AugMix" citation appearing in 16 papers across AAAI, IJCAI and NeurIPS — the paper's own root-cause trace does not point to one author reading another's reference list. It points to a shared upstream tool: "we found that OpenReview's cite button returns this incorrect title, which may be the source of this repeated error." A survey reported in the same paper (Section VII, n=94, self-reported) finds 72.6% of respondents rely on Google Scholar's "Cite" button for references, versus 4.8% who copy BibTeX entries from other papers' lists — consistent with a shared-tool, not shared-reading, explanation being the more common path for errors to repeat identically.

A tool returning the same wrong metadata to sixteen independent authors is a common-cause mechanism; sixteen authors relaying an error from each other's reference lists is a diffusion-chain mechanism. The two produce the same observable (an identical repeated error) but are not the same process, and GhostCite's repeat-count data alone cannot distinguish them. This matters for how the vault uses GhostCite elsewhere: observation-copying-model-predicts-cross-field-citation-silence and observation-david-brachet-ghostcite-cosine-087-pairing-is-hedged-false-friend both lean on GhostCite's AugMix case as the clearest available evidence that citations propagate by one author copying another's unread reference, in support of a broader citation-copying model (claim-simkin-roychowdhury-2002-identical-citation-misprints-are-copy-fingerprints-implying-about-20-percent-of-citers-read-the-original). GhostCite's own strongest case for that mechanism is, on its own telling, better explained by a shared tool than by reader-to-reader copying.