Citation integrity is a shared responsibility, but shared responsibility does not guarantee that citations are actually verified. This article examines the gap between collective accountability and clear operational ownership.
Peer review was built for a world of human-scale citation production. AI has changed that. This article examines the growing gap between citation production and verification—and asks who actually owns the responsibility for checking references.
Peer review does not guarantee that every citation is real or accurate. This article explains how nonexistent references can survive publication and why authors, editors and publishers need a separate citation-verification step.
Compare five ways to check if a citation is real: manual checking, reference managers, AI detectors, human review, and automated citation verification. Learn what each method can and cannot verify before submission.