Weirdly enough, this is something AI can be useful for! Ask if all of the references can be found in PubMed or Google Scholar exactly as written, ignoring minor punctuation, and list the ones that aren’t. This is a good task for editors (I say as an editor myself).
Amanda Moehring
absolutely wild to see people out here saying that it is responsibility of peer reviewers to check for hallucinated references. it is hard enough to persuade people to read articles and provide reviews. expecting them to spend hours cross reffing literature is unreal.
