My father used to talk about this in medicine—occasionally you’d find some “common knowledge” factoid that, it you followed it back five hops down the citation chain, always terminated with some poorly designed 15-person study from the 30s that was wildly inadequate to support the claim.
Fascinating account showing how a false claim can become widely accepted (and propagated by multiple independent sources) as a result of a common academic shortcut: citing a source you haven't actually read after seeing it cited by another source: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....