By William Bernet and Shenmeng Xu

Misinformation is widespread in political discourse, mental health literature and pure science. This article describes the recurrent publication of the same misinformation about parental alienation (PA), i.e. variations of the statement: "The theory of PA assumes that the favoured parent has caused PA in the child simply because the child refuses to have a relationship with the rejected parent, without alienating behaviours on the part of the favoured parent being identified or proven". Ninety-four examples of the same misinformation were identified and subjected to citation analysis using Gephi software, which shows the links between the cited material and the cited material. The recurrent misinformation reported here is not trivial; these statements are significant misrepresentations of AP theory. Plausible explanations for this trail of misinformation are the authors' psychological mindset (i.e., confirmation bias) and the authors' writing skills (e.g., sloppy research practices such as persistent use of secondary sources for their information). The authors of this article recommend that publications containing significant misinformation be corrected or retracted.