How are we dealing with fake citations?
We got a request today from a student to ILL a paper based off a citation in an article they read. After investigating, we determined the paper didn’t exist. Then we started looking and at least the first 7 references don’t exist.
Here’s the paper: N. Margatan and T. Oktavia, "Critical Success Factor of Discord Usage: A Systematic Literature Review," 2024 International Conference on Intelligent Cybernetics Technology & Applications (ICICyTA), Bali, Indonesia, 2024, pp. 601-606, doi: 10.1109/ICICYTA64807.2024.10913223.
This is the paper the student requested:
Khan, M. L., & Hoffmann, C. P. ( 2022 ). Fostering a sense of belonging in online communities: The case of Discord servers. New Media & Society.
As you can see there are a couple of red flags: It appears to be a journal article, but there’s no DOI, there’s no volume or issue number, there’s no pages.
I contacted IEEE “publishing ethics” office. The professor who taught the course also contacted IEEE.
But I’m curious what other libraries are doing in response to this, what you’re doing to educate users, etc? Does anyone know of any tools that can detect if a citation in an article or book is possibly fake? Have you or your ILL team encountered this yet?