What is surprising, however, is that there is evidence that the VSM evolved over a much longer period of time than is usually acknowledged and that Salton did not publish an articulation of the model and its assumptions until several years after criticisms of those assumptions had been leveled and alternative models proposed.

and

[T]he real evolution of the VSM (as people conceived it) is even more fascinating than citation errors for which Dr. Salton bears none of the blame. What began as a growing comfort in using vector spaces to explain computations led to the use of language that suggested the VSM was a retrieval model in its own right. When Salton and his colleagues were challenged on the implications of taking that language seriously, they joined their critics in reinterpreting their earlier writings.

Because I am no information retrieval specialist so I will cite the William Webber’s commentry on the whole issue,

[V]ector spaces were first introduced by Salton and collaborators as a handy way of visualising and describing similarity computations; that other papers misunderstood Salton as proposing the vector space model as a formal model of information retrieval, and criticised it on that basis; and that it was in response to those criticisms that Salton finally, in the 1980s, explicitly described the vector space model as it is now understood.

Does this paper indicates towards an isolated example or there are more hidden phantom instances? Answer is a big NO. In their article Read before you cite! M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury show that misprint distributions in citations follow a Zipf law and only about 20% of citers read the original. Further they suggest

In the past decade with the advent of the Internet, the ease with which would-be non-readers can copy from unreliable sources, as well as would-be readers can access the original has become equally convenient, but there is no increased incentive for those who read the original to also make verbatim copies, especially from unreliable resources.

In my opinion there are several factors working together to create this kind of situation ,
1. Lack of motivation in authors to read the papers they cite
2. Citing without context or reason seems to be a major cause for citations errors
3. Lack of originality in opinion, thought and research reported
4. Unintentional typo mistakes propagated due to copy cat habit of following authors
5. Although a small percentage of people read the papers they cite but due to their laziness they just copies a citation from an unreliable reference list
6. Publishers are equally blamed for this kind of problem especially when there are more than 100 citations styles and lot of them look like similar but they are different
One thing is sure that we need better tools to create, manage and process the citations during manuscript writing process. As Dubin suggests that

Another irony—one representing a more fitting tribute to Salton’s legacy—is that locating papers containing the mistaken citation is very difficult using conventional citation databases such as the Web of Science. But discovery of the errors is greatly aided by search engines such as Google and CiteSeer—systems that employ techniques similar to those that Salton himself refined and recommended.

Making the whole citations management workflow easy and user friendly can provide required motivation to create citation list from scratch rather than just copying from unreliable sources, and as matter of fact tools like CiteULike , Connotea or others can handle this kind of problems (check out my previous post on Collaborative scientific writing and sharing using freely available tools).