[noodlesUK]

It astonishes me that there would be so many cases of things like wrong authors. I began using a citation manager that extracted metadata automatically (zotero in my case) more than 15 years ago, and can’t imagine writing an academic paper without it or a similar tool.

How are the authors even submitting citations? Surely they could be required to send a .bib or similar file? It’s so easy to then quality control at least to verify that citations exist by looking up DOIs or similar.

I know it wouldn’t solve the human problem of relying on LLMs but I’m shocked we don’t even have this level of scrutiny.

[pama]

Maybe you haven’t carefully checked yet the correctness of automatic tools or of the associated metadata. Zotero is certainly not bug free. Even authors themselves have miss-cited their own past work on occasion, and author lists have had errors that get revised upon resubmission or corrected in errata after publication. The DOI is indeed great, and if it is correct, I can still use the citation as a reader, but the (often abbreviated) lists of authors often have typos. In this case the error rate is not particularly high compared to random early review-level submissions I’ve seen many decades ago. Tools helped increase the number of citations and reduce the error per citation but not sure if they reduced the papers that have at least one error.

[noodlesUK]

I agree that the author lists in various metadata sources and databases are often a bit wrong (weird formatting of names for instance is very common), but many of the cases in the OP article are pretty egregious and far beyond just data entry issues.

Presumably the citation scanner they're using is relying on similar data sources as Zotero in any case to detect these sorts of issues.

Regardless, my comment still stands, it seems like the submission is relying on the actual text of the bibliography being correct, rather than requiring a machine readable citation metadata file of some sort, which would at least allow much of the quality control checks to be automated (and certainly would preclude complete hallucinations of nonexistent papers getting through).