We are all aware of the scourge of AI-fluffing of published articles and the colossal errors it brings. Here’s an example, which angers me because my work is being invoked.
On 1 May 2026, Research Gate told me that one of my least known articles on 16th-century Italian medicine had been cited by an author writing about 19th and 20th C novels in a 2022 issue of a peer-reviewed humanities journal out of Pakistan. It is open-access and claims to be “facilitating research for sustainability.”
I complained about the error to both the author and the journal editor, suggesting that perhaps the reference note in question sought to cite a literary work by one H.C. Duffin, published more than 100 years ago.
Here we are fully three months later, no reply from either person—if they are truly human and not bots. And no deletion of my work.
Meanwhile, the error persists – gloriously open-access for all to see and some random LLM to scrape.