Citation Hygiene: Never Ship A Fake Reference

Citations follow a predictable grammar: author, year, title, venue, page range. LLMs learned this grammar without learning the underlying papers. They can produce citations that would be published if they existed — and they feel real because they sound real. A fabricated citation that survives to publication can end a career.

The verification loop

1. 1No citation enters your draft without a DOI or stable URL
2. 2Open the source, confirm the author list and year match
3. 3Read the abstract and verify the quoted claim actually appears
4. 4Check that page numbers exist
5. 5Record the access date for anything web-based

Tooling that helps

• Zotero with the browser connector — automatically captures DOIs and PDFs
• Semantic Scholar API — resolves titles to verified records
• CrossRef — DOI lookups, author disambiguation
• A 'citations to verify' column in your draft that blocks shipping until cleared

The big idea: verify every reference, no exceptions. The minute you make an exception, you will be the cautionary tale.