This morning when I opened my email I was very excited to find a Google Scholar update telling me of two new citations from two different sets of authors each to a different paper of mine. As usual, I immediately checked the papers to find out if the authors were praising or criticising my work (or perhaps they found a mistake in one of my papers!). To my surprise, in one case the authors wrote a misleading statement which resulted from stretching quite a lot some of my conclusions. In the other case, the authors simply made an incorrect claim (details below for the curious). It's not the first time this happens to me - I even got one citation completely out of context once. How to react to this kind of situation?
Details for the curious:
In the first case, the authors cite a paper of mine where I compare two different methods to calculate elastic properties of materials. My main conclusion is that one of the methods converges much faster than the other one with the size of the basis set - in other words, it's computationally much cheaper. For calculations with usual basis sets the first method is much more accurate than the second one, with disagreements between the two in the order of 10% or even 20%. They claim that I show that both methods agree within a 1% of each other, which is misleading at best, because for the second method to agree within 1% of the first one one needs to do a very expensive calculation. That is one of the main points of the paper and it got completely overlooked by the authors.
In the second case, the citation is plainly wrong. The authors cite my paper as an experimental work on InGaN semiconductors while it actually is purely computational.
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