This happened to me too. The ITiCSE paper I wrote a while back, I found a carnige melon paper that cited me as two different people within the same citation.

Yep, exactly. That’s because the other paper already has all the bibliographical info you need – so you don’t need to look for the journal name, issue, page numbers and all that stuff if someone else already did the legwork. :)

its also possible that one reads the original paper, but copies the citation from another paper. i’ve done this several times (and have hopefully not propagated any citation errors!!).