The citation format needs an overhaul.
Make citations hyperlinked and publicly accessible. Past a certain date (2004?), make it mandatory. And if the research is mega paywalled, well… perhaps we should do something about that, too.
Then they’d be machine-verifiable.
The system has been dysfunctional. As it is elsewhere, the convenience of AI fraud/slop is simply exacerbating the existing issue to breaking points.
Make citations hyperlinked and publicly accessible.
It’s already the standard in many journals that citations should include a hyperlinked DOI.
And if the research is mega paywalled, well… perhaps we should do something about that, too.
That’s also increasingly the standard, for example all of my publications (and I left science years ago) can be accessed in preprint format without a paywall.
Then machine checking should be implemented
Whatever needs to be restructured to make citations automatically verifiable needs to happen, and then this will be less of an issue.
Frankly, this is something that already should be, and to a large degree is, manually checked by editors and referees.
While this is a problem that should be taken seriously, it’s also something that mainly affects trash-tier journals. You won’t find many hallucinated citations in Nature or Science (I doubt there has been a single one), and authors have strong incentives to prevent it from happening as they risk their reputation (and with it future grants).