Prove It · Module 3: Real sources
Spotting the fake
Fabricated references have tells, and once you know them you will see them in seconds.
The author is real but the paper is not: a well-known name in the field attached to a title that sounds like something they would write. The journal is real but the volume and page numbers do not match anything. The title is slightly too perfect, describing exactly what you asked for. The year is plausible but the work does not appear in the author's publication list. The DOI or URL looks right but resolves to nothing, or to something else. And the quotation is fluent, on-point, and cannot be found anywhere in the cited document.
The test is always the same: go and find it. Search the exact title in quotation marks. Check the author's own list. Open the link. Two minutes. If it is not there, it is not there.
| Tell | What to do |
|---|---|
| Real author, unfamiliar title | Check the author's publication list or profile |
| Title matches your question too exactly | Search the exact title in quotation marks |
| Link or DOI given | Open it. It must resolve to the cited work, not a similar one |
| Direct quotation supplied | Find the quotation inside the source. Search the document for it |
| Statistic with no primary source | Find who measured it. If only secondary mentions exist, treat as unverified |
In practice. A student on placement produced a literature summary with twelve references. Her supervisor searched three at random. One was real. One was a real author with an invented title. One was entirely fictional, journal included. The summary was rebuilt from sources she had actually read, and it was better.
At your desk. Take any AI-generated reference list from your own work or a colleague's, with permission. Check every entry using the table. Record how many were real, near-real and fictional.
Write it down.
- References checked:
- Real
- near-real
- fictional:
- The tell that gave the fake away: