Frankly, this is something that already should be, and to a large degree is, manually checked by editors and referees.
While this is a problem that should be taken seriously, it’s also something that mainly affects trash-tier journals. You won’t find many hallucinated citations in Nature or Science (I doubt there has been a single one), and authors have strong incentives to prevent it from happening as they risk their reputation (and with it future grants).
Still, what about citations of articles that themselves contain hallucinated citations? It’s a food chain problem.
I guess what I’m saying is the checking should be more… accessible? And less costly, hence machine automatable. This would increase the quality of journals that, for whatever reason, don’t do enough human verification, and it would allow bigger journals to do deeper checks “down the chain” with the same labor.
Frankly, this is something that already should be, and to a large degree is, manually checked by editors and referees.
While this is a problem that should be taken seriously, it’s also something that mainly affects trash-tier journals. You won’t find many hallucinated citations in Nature or Science (I doubt there has been a single one), and authors have strong incentives to prevent it from happening as they risk their reputation (and with it future grants).
Still, what about citations of articles that themselves contain hallucinated citations? It’s a food chain problem.
I guess what I’m saying is the checking should be more… accessible? And less costly, hence machine automatable. This would increase the quality of journals that, for whatever reason, don’t do enough human verification, and it would allow bigger journals to do deeper checks “down the chain” with the same labor.