The idea that references in a scientific paper should be plentiful but aren't really that important, is a consequence of a previous technological revolution: the internet.

You'll find a lot of papers from, say, the '70s, with a grand total of maybe 10 references, all of them to crucial prior work, and if those references don't say what the author claims they should say (e.g. that the particular method that is employed is valid), then chances are that the current paper is weaker than it seems, or even invalid, and so it is extremely important to check those references.

Then the internet came along, scientists started padding their work with easily found but barely relevant references and journal editors started requiring that even "the earth is round" should be well-referenced. The result is that peer reviewers feel that asking them to check the references is akin to asking them to do a spell check. Fair enough, I agree, I usually can't be bothered to do many or any citation checks when I am asked to do peer review, but it's good to remember that this in itself is an indication of a perverted system, which we just all ignored -- at our peril -- until LLM hallucinations upset the status quo.

> The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document.

I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no?

> They are also assuming good faith.

I can only relate this to code review, but assuming good faith means you assume they didn't try to introduce a bug by adding this dependency. But I would should still check to make sure this new dep isn't some typosquatted package. That's the rigor I'm responsible for.

I think the root problem is that everyone involved, from authors to reviewers to publishers, know that 99.999% of papers are completely of no consequence, just empty calories with the sole purpose of padding quotas for all involved, and thus are not going to put in the effort as if.

This is systemic, and unlikely to change anytime soon. There have been remedies proposed (e.g. limits on how many papers an author can publish per year, let's say 4 to be generous), but they are unlikely to gain traction as thoug most would agree onbenefits, all involved in the system would stand to lose short term.

> I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real

I guess this explains all those times over the years where I follow a citation from a paper and discover it doesn’t support what the first paper claimed.

As a reviewer I at least skimmed the papers for every reference in every paper that I review. If it isn't useful to furthering the point of the paper then my feedback is to remove the reference. Adding a bunch of junk because it is broadly related in a giant background section is a waste of everyone's time and should be removed. Most of the time you are mostly aware of the papers being cited anyway because that is the whole point of reviewing in your area of expertise.

Agreed. I used to review lots of submissions for IEEE and similar conferences, and didn't consider it my job to verify every reference. No one did, unless the use of the reference triggered an "I can't believe it said that" reaction. Of course, back then, there wasn't a giant plagiarism machine known to fabricate references, so if tools can find fake references easily the tools should be used.

Wow. I went to law school and was on the law review. That was our precise job for the papers selected for publication. To verify every single citation.

>I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real.

Doesn't this sound like something that could be automated?

for paper_name in citations... do a web search for it, see if it there's a page in the results with that title.

That would at least give you "a paper with this name exists".

I agree with you (I have reviewed papers in the past), however, made-up citations are a "signal". Why would the authors do that? If they made it up, most likely they haven't really read that prior work. If they haven't, have they really done proper due dilligence on their research? Are they just trying to "beef up" their paper with citations to unfairly build up credibility?

Surely there are tools to retrieve all the citations, publishers should spot it easily.

However the paper is submitted, like a folder on a cloud drive, just have them include a folder with PDFs/abstracts of all the citations?

They might then fraudulently produce papers to cite, but they can't cite something that doesn't exist.

correct me if I'm wrong but citations in papers follow a specific format, and the case here is that a tool was used to validate that they are all real. Certainly a tool that scans a paper for all citations and verifies that they actually exist in the journals they reference shouldn't be all that technically difficult to achieve?

This is half the basis for the replication crisis, no? Shady papers come out and people cite them endlessly with no critical thought or verification.

After all, their grant covers their thesis, not their thesis plus all of the theses they cite.

It is absolutely the reviewers job to check citations. Who else will check and what is the point of peer review then? So you’d just happily pass on shoddy work because it’s not your job? You’re reviewing both the authors work and if there were people to at needed to ensure citations were good, you’re checking their work also. This is very much the problem today with this “not my problem” mindset. If it passes review, the reviewer is also at fault. Not excuses.

In short, a review has no objective value, it is just an obstacle to be gamed.