[toast0]

If your co-author inserted the fradulent reference, I agree that you may not have committed fraud. But your co-author did, and you didn't check their work. and knowing that you didn't check their work, you signed off on it.

You didn't pick your co-author very well, but arXiv lacks investigative powers to determine which co-author did the bad, so they all get the consequence.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Do you think every co-author on a 100-author paper checks every citation? It's like saying that every member of a large software team personally reviews every line of code. It's just completely divorced from reality.

[toast0]

How many papers have 100 authors?

Again, I'm not in academia, but most of the papers I see have two to five authors; maybe I've seen one or two with ten authors.

Regardless, if I'm signing my name on something, I check it out.

A reference that doesn't exist is like a source release that doesn't compile. Any one of the 100 person team could have figured it out but no one did. In a 100 person team you get diffuse responsibility dynamics where checking citations is not assigned to specific people so no one does it. Or perhaps it's assigned to a single person who was also in charge of writing the citations and falsified them rather than doing the work.

[DiogenesKynikos]

There are lots of 100-author papers, especially from big projects.

Responsibility really is diffuse. That's the nature of things. On a 100-author paper, 80 people are there because they worked on the upstream data source. 15 are there because they gave advice to the primary author. 3 are there because they wrote individual sections or appendices. 1 is there because they proof-read the paper and made general suggestions. 1 is there because they led the work and wrote the paper.

Now, do you actually think every one of those people is going to go through all 75 citations in the paper and carefully check that the bibliographic information is correct, and that every citation is correctly summarized? This is not a one-liner like checking if a project compiles. This is hours and hours (or more realistically, several days) of work.

You have an idealized view of how science works that is just not in line with reality.

[dataflow]

Thanks for this.