Citogenesis.

Martin Langeveld (“Old newspaper guy”), a longtime friend of the Hattery, sent me a link to Elizabeth Bromstein’s NiemanLab article about her search for the origin of the “statistic” that 75% of your emotions are generated by smell, which turned out to be unsourceable: There’s a name for the particular way an unsupported claim can acquire the appearance of fact through citation: citogenesis. Coined by Randall Munroe in an XKCD comic, the term describes the process by which an unsupported claim gets repeatedly cited until the citations themselves make it look like truth. I called Jodi Schneider, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Information School whose research includes scientific evidence and citation integrity, to talk about it. I sent her the 75% statistic, and she went looking for the source herself. “It was not a casual ‘Let me look for 20 minutes, and there it is,’” she told me. “I would find a thing, [it] would go to something else, and that would be…