Comment by DiogenesKynikos
12 hours ago
Do you think every co-author on a 100-author paper checks every citation? It's like saying that every member of a large software team personally reviews every line of code. It's just completely divorced from reality.
How many papers have 100 authors?
Again, I'm not in academia, but most of the papers I see have two to five authors; maybe I've seen one or two with ten authors.
Regardless, if I'm signing my name on something, I check it out.
A reference that doesn't exist is like a source release that doesn't compile. Any one of the 100 person team could have figured it out but no one did. In a 100 person team you get diffuse responsibility dynamics where checking citations is not assigned to specific people so no one does it. Or perhaps it's assigned to a single person who was also in charge of writing the citations and falsified them rather than doing the work.
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