I mean, if you’re able to take the citation, find the cited work, and definitively state ‘looks like they got the title wrong’ or ‘they attributed the paper to the wrong authors’, that doesn’t sound like what people usually mean when they say a ‘hallucinated’ citation. Work that is lazily or poorly cited but nonetheless attempts to cite real work is not the problem. Work which gives itself false authority by claiming to cite works that simply do not exist is the main concern surely?

>Work which gives itself false authority by claiming to cite works that simply do not exist is the main concern surely?

You'd think so, but apparently it isn't for these folks. On the other hand, saying "we've found 50 hallucinations in scientific papers" generates a lot more clicks than "we've found 50 common citation mistakes that people make all the time"