Fake references

Fake references shouldn't be a thing! Unfortunately, they are. I've had to call people in before, because they had non-existent references in their reference list. And generally, it turns out that the student in question had had an attack of bad time management, and basically panicked. And involved AI. Not a good idea! And given that it is marking time again, this is the time when that sort of thing might happen again. And it did.

In this case, I had to call two students in, and in both cases I had detected the issue myself. One student only had three references, and they were incomplete. And if it is just three, you might as well check. Especially as one of the references looked like something I should know about. But looking them up didn't work. And if it's a full reference, with journal, volume, issue, and page numbers, you can just look them up precisely where the student claims they are. But with just title, authors, year and journal, you can’t. I asked that student to send me the PDFs of the articles, in case they existed. Unfortunately I did not receive such PDFs.

In the other case, I just spotted a reference that surprised me. I know the author, and I thought the year was a bit early. Was he really already publishing about this topic in that year? So I had a Google. And nothing came up. They also were two articles by an author combination I hadn't seen before. I looked these up as well. Nothing. One of them was a complete reference, and then you can check these very page numbers in that very issue. And if it doesn’t match, you have conclusive proof that the reference is fake. I checked all the other references; the student had a lot more, and the majority fortunately existed. Four didn't.

I have no idea how often things like this slip under the radar! You can't possibly check all the references of all the assignments you mark. But we would normally mark assignments in our own field. And then you get this sort of things I had. An unusual year, an unusual combination of authors, an unusual topic, might all raise suspicion. I know I'm not the only one; I remember a colleague who had noticed that there was a reference to a paper of an author writing about a particular species of fish, and my colleague knew that this person did not actually study this fish. So I think we pick up quite a lot of this kind of things. But I will never know!

Well I never know? Well, I could of course do a test, and select a large number of assignments at random to check if all the references exist. If you check enough of them, you will get a statistically robust result. But this sounds like so much work! The idea is interesting, though. And it will be interesting to see if there is any pattern in what goes undetected. Hm! I might be onto something. I wish I felt I had the time to do this sort of thing. Because it is genuinely interesting to get an idea of the scale of this problem. And get a few clues on what we could do about it…