Comment by patcon
14 hours ago
A citation is where you derived knowledge... If you haven't checked it and you are submitting something that should represent a ton of labour (and which will consume labour to review), you don't understand what you're doing. It is not just crossing T's and dotting I'd.
Your being set behind is less important than the fact that your publishing is setting everyone else behind.
Such a banned person is being helped to "step out of the way", and someone more competent will assuredly step forward to consume the limited maintenance labour more thoughtfully
> Your being set behind is less important than the fact that your publishing is setting everyone else behind
One hallucinated citation does not in any way imply anyone is being left behind. All it means nobody is checked that particular line of the manuscript after it was written. The rest of the paper could still be solid and treated accordingly. If you find evidence of the contrary, of course treat it accordingly, but this is so obviously not that.
> One hallucinated citation does not in any way imply anyone is being left behind.
The parent said “setting” others behind, which refers to lost time.
Being “left” behind implies a degraded trajectory, which is defined not by time lost, but by the final destination.
Different but related things (e.g. lost time can indeed affect your final destination, for instance, after growing old correcting a scourge of hallucinated citations - which should have been table stakes all along).
That was literally just a typo, I was walking and messed up while typing. Pretend I wrote "set behind." It makes no difference to my point and I fully stand behind the comment with that correction.
If all you're genuinely worried about is the collective human time spent on tracing down one stupid hallucinated citation in a paper, may I remind you of the ludicrous amounts of time and effort readers waste trying to wade through the sea fluff, jargon, and complexity frequently added to papers in a completely deliberate fashion. If wasting even a little bit of readers' time is what you see as the crime here, you have orders of magnitude bigger fish to fry.
The fact is that, for one hallucinated citation to be the noteworthy bit that "sets others behind" in any meaningful way, the actual substance of your paper has to be utterly worthless (or worse); otherwise, you're contributing far more than you're taking away, and thus your paper is very much not setting others behind. OTOH, if your paper really is worthless or harmful enough for this part of it to be a big deal, that would be the basis for punishment, not this. A single hallucinated citation is simply not a bleep on that metaphorical radar.
No. It's fraud.
You clearly misunderstand. You cite a work in your paper because you have read that work, and build upon it or want to refer to it to back up a specific claim. Generating references is fraud period, because you are implying that you have read a work when in fact you just asked an AI "please insert some reference-shaped text here" to make it look like a proper paper. It is sadly not a necessary, but certainly a VERY sufficient, reason to conclude a paper is fraudulent.