Should we welcome hallucinated references?: citation integrity beyond fabricated sources

The phenomenon of hallucinated references, non‑existent publications invented by generative AI tools that seem plausible, has prompted understandable concern in scholarly publishing. I argue that the prevailing response is too myopic. Hallucinated references present a serious research integrity problem, but they are also a particularly visible manifestation of a broader citation pathology that is the use of real references to support claims that the cited works do not in fact establish. The latter problem is harder to detect because it cannot be resolved by checking whether a bibliographic item exists, requiring instead semantic judgement about the relation between a citing claim and a cited source. I argue that the current scandal should therefore be used to widen, rather than narrow, editorial concern with reference integrity. The existing infrastructure and tools already address parts of this problem, from metadata checking to citation‑context classification, but they do not remove the need for institutional responsibility. Thus, the response to the current crisis should aim at accountability for citation practices, rather than merely better detection of fabricated sources.