One wonders why this has not been largely fully automated. If we track those citations anyway. Surely we have database of them and most of them are easily matched there. So only outliers need to be checked either as new latest papers or mistakes which should be close enough to something or real fakes.

Maybe there just is no incentive for this type of activity.

For that matter, it could be automated at the source. Let's say I'm an author. I'd gladly run a "linter" on my article that flags references that can't be tracked, and so forth. It would be no different than testing a computer program that I write before giving it to someone.

It seems like the GPT zero team is automating it! Up to very recently, no one sane would cite a paper with correct title but make up random authors- and shortly, this specific signal will be goodhearted away by a “make my malpractice less detectable MCP,” so I can see why this automation is happening exactly now.

We do have these things and they are often wrong. Loads of the examples given look better than things I’ve seen in real databases on this kind of thing and I worked in this area for a decade.