Yep. I think it goes further than whether there's a published paper about. It boils down to "does the question have exactly one correct answer?"
One important thing you learn in interviewer workshops is to avoid asking questions with "aha" components, i.e. things that can only be solved if a very specific insight is known. This type of question is problematic because it falls victim to the fallacious assumption that a candidate that excels in one specific problem must necessarily excel at others that are in actuality, at best, only marginally related.
Instead, it is better to ask questions for which the solution can be arrived at with small increments in effort (e.g. maybe there's an obvious brute force solution and you start from there to discuss more optimal solutions, or maybe the candidate got stuck on some specific peculiarity and you can give a hint to unblock them and move on to another part of the problem to get more signal)
The "aha moment" is also known as the eureka effect. Psychologists call this "insight problem solving", which is terrible for interviewing since like you said since it isn't a problem that you can build up towards solving. As a teacher, I try to make sure my assignments/quizzes don't fall victim of this.
For anyone interested, there are a lot of interesting studies on the topic if you search on Google Scholar. You've probably already seen matchstick arithmetic problems before (i.e., move a single matchstick to make the equation valid).
It never ceases to amaze me that a profession full of people that studied something called “computer science” is also filled with people that refuse to read the literature when it comes to hiring and instead lean on gut feelings, anecdotes, and cargo cult-ing.
I've researched a lot about this since I've had to do hiring, but I haven't been lucky enough to find anything collectively definitive or comprehensive enough to describe as "the literature." Most of it leans towards "what not to do," which is helpful but leaves some gaps. What do you recommend?
One important thing you learn in interviewer workshops is to avoid asking questions with "aha" components, i.e. things that can only be solved if a very specific insight is known. This type of question is problematic because it falls victim to the fallacious assumption that a candidate that excels in one specific problem must necessarily excel at others that are in actuality, at best, only marginally related.
Instead, it is better to ask questions for which the solution can be arrived at with small increments in effort (e.g. maybe there's an obvious brute force solution and you start from there to discuss more optimal solutions, or maybe the candidate got stuck on some specific peculiarity and you can give a hint to unblock them and move on to another part of the problem to get more signal)