Comment by toast0

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.