The tendency of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to ‘hallucinate’ false information is well known; AI-generated citations to non-existent sources have penetrated the bibliographies of peer-reviewed publications. Drawing from the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines, American judicial contention with generative AI, and the submission of prior art to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the author proposes that journals require authors to submit the full text of each cited source along with their manuscripts, thereby preventing authors from citing material whose full text they cannot produce. This solution requires limited additional work by authors or editors while effectively immunizing journals against hallucinated references.

Introduction: Thorough maintenance of the scientific record is needed to ensure the trustworthiness of its content. This can be undermined by a stealth correction, which is at least one post-publication change made to a scientific article, without providing a correction note or any other indicator that the publication was temporarily or permanently altered. In this paper we provide several examples of stealth corrections in order to demonstrate that these exist within the scientific literature. As far as we are aware, no documentation of such stealth corrections was previously reported in the scientific literature. Methods: We identified stealth corrections ourselves, or found already reported ones on the public database pubpeer.com or through social media accounts of known science sleuths. Results: In total we report 131 articles that were affected by stealth corrections and were published between 2005 and 2024. These stealth corrections were found among multiple publishers and scientific fields. Conclusion: and recommendations Stealth corrections exist in the scientific literature. This needs to end immediately as it threatens scientific integrity. We recommend the following: 1) Tracking all changes to the published record by all publishers in an open, uniform and transparent manner, preferably by online submission systems that log every change publicly, making stealth corrections impossible; 2) Clear definitions and guidelines on all types of corrections; 3) Support sustained vigilance of the scientific community to publicly register stealth corrections.