Going through the bibliography of other people's papers and theses, looking for papers that you better cite "for good luck", or because "you gotta cite that one" is a classic PhD student behavior (I've done it) and it's not terribly surprising that something like this can happen. In fact I'd expect it to be much more widespread...
Feeling the need to cite a particular work out of convention or for social reasons is understandable and very common AFAIK, but I'd consider it a part of academic rigour to at least take look at the work one is citing. Blindly citing without ever even laying one's eyes on the work doesn't sound quite right.
Of course if nobody can get their hands on a particular work, as seems to be the case here, that makes things kind of hard. But I'd expect most works you need to cite in a fast-moving field such as CS to be available at least somewhere, even if it takes a bit of effort.
One of the only notes I got from my MS thesis defense was one of the professors being annoyed that I had cited a result from someone else's paper that he had reported (effectively the same but derived differently and less conclusively) in one of his own papers. I added a note referring to his result and a citation to his paper and everybody went home happy.
Sometimes it's just an attempt to do the due diligence of citing the primary reference rather than the reference that cited the reference that cited the primary reference. I experienced this recently with a very widely cited basic fact in a very hard to come by technical report from the early 80s. I'd have bet dollars to cents it did in fact contain the statement everyone claimed it did.. however, just in case I made an inter-library loan request to actually read those couple sentences.
> Sometimes it's just an attempt to do the due diligence of citing the primary reference rather than the reference that cited the reference that cited the primary reference.
True, but in this case you should include both references.
Funny, in my high school literature class I clearly remember being chastised for having sources in my works cited; but not warranting their inclusion with an actual reference in the work.
It's kind of wild that LLMs and other models/sequences will be able to quickly suss out which papers have high levels of referential integrity.
>which papers have high levels of referential integrity
The problem with this, as I see it IMO, is that there could be references that are cited due to their influence on the thought process/writing process of the work - thus citing them gives contextual zeitgeist - and this is something that AI would not be able to muster...
SO a LACK of referential integrity should show that it is written by a human as opposed to an AI.
