At least Evernote was saved by Bending Spoons. At one point, even Evernote was getting roughly a third of its monthly revenue from merchandise, which is pretty wild for a paperless note-taking app and a decent sign that the core business was already in bad shape. For the rest, though, they seem very good at squeezing hard whatever is left.
Verifying that the reference you cite actually exists is the absolute minimum standard for academic work. It is not optional, not something to skip because of a deadline, and not something to outsource blindly to hallucination-prone AI.
If someone cannot meet that bar, they have no business publishing research papers. I have written academic papers myself, and I find it astonishing that people are trying to justify this as if it were some understandable workflow mistake. At that point it is simply slop with academic formatting. Post it on a blog or somewhere else, but do not put it into the scientific record.
A one-year ban is not a lifetime ban. Maybe six months would also have been enough, but the author can use that time to think about whether they should verify references next time — and to manually check every other citation.
I would not necessarily go as far as calling it fraud, but if you cannot even verify that the reference you are citing actually exists, you are not ready to publish research papers.
Deadlines are not an excuse here. Checking whether a cited book, paper, or passage exists is the absolute minimum standard for scientific work, not an optional extra. I have written academic papers myself, and I find it astonishing that people are trying to justify this as if it were some understandable workflow mistake. At that point it is simply slop with academic formatting.
A one-year ban is not a lifetime ban. Maybe six months would also have been enough, but the point is that the author gets time to think about whether they should verify references next time. They can also use that time to manually check every other citation.
20+ years in. For me, agentic coding has been nothing short of a godsend -- not because it writes code for me, but because it lets me explore and prototype things that would have taken days of reading docs and ramping up. The creative surface area of what I can touch in a week has expanded dramatically.
Where I worry is beginners. The hard-won intuition for "this is a reasonable approach" vs. "this will bite you in six months" takes years to develop. With experience, you steer the agent. Without it, the agent steers you -- and it steers confidently in every direction, good and bad alike.