“This is more complex than it may at first appear, as references can be detailed by authors in a variety of different ways, often do not include DOIs, and simple tools to identify hallucinated references can produce false positives,” Graf told us by email.

It’s not complex when you have a fucking style manual which specifies exactly how you detail references so you don’t have this kind of problem.

The USA has several: MLA, APA, Imrad, etc but none of them explicitly require control numbers or serial numbers from publications.

Meanwhile, I knew a guy in the UK who did a dissertation on market economies and they literally did not specify any kind of format for him at all.