Head-scratching Citations

As a scholar, of course I'm always curious if someone cites my work. I mean, I do work rather hard on my academic articles, so it's always nice to know that they're -- well, maybe not having an effect -- but at least being read. Since I've only been active a few years, there's not been much chance for anything of mine to have really infiltrated intellectual discourse, but I just checked my Google Scholar citations. . . .and one of them left me scratching my head.

 The article in question is "Ghostbusters is For Boys: Understanding Geek Masculinity’s Role in the Alt-right" for the journal Communication Culture & Critique. It's a communications journal, obviously, in APA style, and my name appears in the lit review section. Here is the citation:
This [alt-right] discourse becomes even more ludicrous when employed in the service of a fandom, as an examination of the comments on the Ghostbusters trailer demonstrates (Koh, 2009; Wise, 2016). [on p. 136 of the article]
 Two things are odd about this:

  1. Rather than quoting one of my articles, they're quoting a review of mine on a collection of essays edited by Christopher E. Bell, Wizards vs. Muggles: Essays on Identity in the Harry Potter Universe.
  2. I have no idea in hell what the authors are talking about.
Neither my review nor  the book in question have anything to do with alt-right discourses, and even the word "conservative" only comes up one (and this in a non-alt-right context). My references to fandom are tangential. There's no page number referenced here, either. APA doesn't require them for non-direct quotes, so it's impossible to check what the authors are referring to. The APA citation of my review doesn't even indicate my cited work is a review.

So this seems like a pretty clear case of two scholars citing an academic text they haven't actually read.** My moment of glory . . . dashed!

 To be fair, I should also point out that lazy citation doesn't necessarily mean that the authors' article is poor. It did, after all, appear in a peer-reviewed journal. This is more a "I'm waggingmy finger and tsking at you, professors!" situation.


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** By the way, there's no shame in reading a review, finding a good quote taken from the reviewed book, and letting that inspire you to use a similiar quote . . . but you always always always consult the original source, and you cite that, not the review. Almost the only valid reason to cite a review, really, is when the reception history of a particular book becomes relevant to your argument.

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