Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography

The work also contained the names of nearly 1,000 people of foreign birth who were closely identified with American history.

One reviewer found this a rather inconvenient method, complaining that the finding of the author of a particular sketch often involved a voyage of discovery through the entire list.

[3] Appletons' Cyclopædia is notorious for including 92 known biographies of fictitious persons, with at least a further 51 entries being deemed suspicious.

[4] [5] The first to discover these fictitious biographies was John Hendley Barnhart in 1919[6][a] when he identified and reprinted, with commentary, 14 biographical sketches of supposed European botanists who had come to the New World to study in Latin America.

[7] The status of fictitious biographies in Appletons' Cyclopædia was assessed by Margaret Castle Schindler of Goucher College in 1937.

[8] There are also significant issues within the fictitious biographies: Joseph Cantillion identified the author of "phantom Jesuit" articles as William Christian Tenner: he identified 43 wholly fictitious subjects in this genre, including a highly fictionalised biography of Rafael Ferrer.

Dobson notes that the first two volumes, where Juan G. Puron appears in this role, are practically free of problem articles, although Barnhart identified an article on "Dávila, Nepomuceno" as suspicious (but not fictitious beyond a shadow of a doubt), while "Chel-Ab-Ku-Kil", "Chignavitcelut" and "Oxiquieb Chiguaihue" are also listed as suspicious.