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.
AI citation checkers are not AI detectors. Instead of guessing whether text was written by AI, they verify whether references are real, accurate, and traceable.