"A Dendrite Method for Cluster Analysis" by Calinski and Harabasz: A Classical Work that is Far Too Often Incorrectly Cited
"A Dendrite Method for Cluster Analysis" was a classical work by Tadeusz Calinski and Joachim Harabasz, published in early Communications in Statistics (Calinski and Harabasz, 1974) Their method is now referred to as one of the most efficient techniques for determining the number of clusters (Milligan and Cooper, 1985; Everitt et al. 2001) At the end of 2010, it is actually second the most often cited work of Communications in Statistics and its two later parts, Theory Methods and Simulation Computation, right behind Kulldorff's 1997 article. Even though this work is so important, a sad thing is that in many articles it is incorrectly cited as: Calinski, R.B. Haratasz, J. (1974) A Dendrite Method for Cluster Analysis. Communications in Statistics 3(1):1 27. I have no idea where the initials R.B. come from I checked the original work, and it is "T. Calinski." (Of course, usually the Polish special character n is spelled as n, but this is not a problem and it is common; and this is not the point of this letter. It is probable that the mistake was made in one of early sources, and works which followed them and based solely on this source just repeated the mistake. For example, both references cited before Milligan and Cooper (1985) and Everitt et al. (2001) used the above incorrect citation. Also, a recent work in Communications in Statistics: Theory Methods (Garcia Escudero et al. 2009) used this citation. But the truth is that the incorrect citation is widespread, not only in scientific literature. For example, in R (R Development Core Team, 2010) thanks to the sos package (Garcia Escudero et al. 2009) I found the reference to the discussed work is made in the five following packages: FD (Laliberte and Legendre, 2010; Laliberte and Shipley, 2010) vegan (Oksanen et al. 2010) clues (Chang et al. 2010) clusterSim (Walesiak and Dudek, 2010) and fpc (Hennig, 2010) Only in the first two (FD and vegan) the citation was correct.