Admittedly, it’s more of a band-aid approach, but it’s gotta be better than nothing. Aaron Tay has a lengthy post describing what’s going on with ghost references, and I’m thinking specifically about how Google Scholar creates them.
Here’s a link to the example in question (now up to 56 citations!), and here are the sections being discussed:
My solution is to pay librarians to flag these suckers. Someone at Google (does anyone know if there’s someone doing QC on this project?) would then have to investigate and then remove the ghost citation. Let’s make it $10/USD for each one that gets removed – Google can afford it. While it’d be a game of whack-a-mole, surely it would help?! Others have proposed the same thing, so it must be a good idea! 🙂 The biggest issue is that someone would have to vet and manage the list of librarians for whom the Dispute button would appear.
One of the links in Aaron’s post goes to a project called LLM Citation Verifier, which might be worth checking out further. It seems more technical than most people would want, but I love that it verifies citations produced by LLMs in real time. One drawback is that it seems to work only if there’s a DOI, which would rule out older stuff.
Maybe this will serve as my kick in the pants to finish the hallucitation project I started about this time last year!
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