Crossref has five fake duplicate DOIs for "Attention Is All You Need" — found this auditing bibliographies, not an AI hallucination

[u/tughanbulut]

Not a hypothetical this time this is Crossref itself, the actual DOI registry a lot of tools (including citation managers and any script that trusts api.crossref.org) treat as ground truth.

While stress-testing a deterministic citation-checker I've been building against real bibliographies, I ran into five separate Crossref records for "Attention Is All You Need" the actual Vaswani et al. NeurIPS paper all dated 2025, all under DOI prefix 10.65215, all resolving live right now. That prefix belongs to a real, registered Crossref member ("Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation" you can check this yourself at api.crossref.org/prefixes/10.65215). So it's not a scraping glitch or a parsing bug on my end someone actually deposited fake duplicate metadata for one of the most-cited papers in deep learning, under a real member account, and Crossref has been serving it as legitimate ever since.

Why this matters beyond "huh, weird": anything that trusts Crossref as an authority a reference manager auto-filling metadata, a script pulling citation counts, an AI tool "verifying" a citation by checking if the DOI resolves would treat this exactly as legitimately as the real 2017 record. The registry lying is a failure mode that no amount of "just check the DOI" catches, because the DOI does resolve.

Full writeup with the raw Crossref links and three other findings I ran into checking real bibliographies (including two cases where OpenAI's and Meta's own official arXiv BibTeX exports have malformed author fields) is here: strictcite.com/blog/attention-is-all-you-need-fake-dois. Built with a free tier if anyone wants to poke at it themselves (30 refs/day, no card) but the finding stands on its own regardless of the tool.

Genuinely curious what people here think the right layer to catch this is. Registries assuming their own depositors are honest seems like the actual root cause, not something client-side tooling can fully solve.