I'm a TA at a medium-sized university in Asia, and as part of my routine, I randomly review student papers before using Turnitin for plagiarism checks. During these reviews, I've come across numerous errors related to citation formatting, including instances where references contain non-existent links. I suspect some students may be using AI writing tools like ChatGPT to generate their papers. To address this issue, I first need to assess the extent of the problem. However, considering the large class size of over 50 students, I'm wondering if there's a tool available that can automatically detect and flag false references or incorrect citations in their papers.
2 Answers
I think I have found the solution after researching for a while, I will suggest this to my professor and the Chair of the department. https://www.scribbr.com/citation/checker/
I would require students to provide a list of DOIs and URLs. DOIs can be checked with these instructions: https://dx.doi.org/
For books, students can provide an ISBN. Those are a bit trickier to validate, but could help.
answered Sep 19 at 2:42
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In machine learning DOIs are not universally assigned at very relevant venues like NeurIPS: link. This might make it hard to demand DOIs universally. Sep 19 at 5:38
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@MarkusLange-Hegermann Which is why I did not recommend that. NeurIPS has both URLs and an ISBN for their most recent proceedings. Sep 19 at 11:06
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That might help with the false references, but it will be a daunting task if students write papers with 20 pages with 50 references and above. Also, will you ignore the miscitation? Probably I will ignore a few, but not about 25 miscitations and above Sep 20 at 3:42
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@throwawayta From experience, DOIs are massively easier to use in writing than traditional citations. Sep 20 at 11:02