Zero-Cost Detection of Fabricated Citations: A Staged Heuristic Approach for Computing Dissertation Assessment

Generative AI's growing role in academic writing has driven a rise in fabricated references across dissertations and student reports. We present the Fabrication Severity Stack (FSS), a three-tiered framework classifying citation fabrications by detection complexity - from non-existent references to subtle content misattribution. Building on the FSS, we propose a staged heuristic verification workflow, executable through mainstream LLM interfaces. We argue that this framework offers computer science educators/examiners a practical, zero-cost basis for embedding reference verification into the assessment of dissertation and students' reports. In a pilot study on 100 citations (20% seeded with Level 1 and Level 2 fabrications), the proposed heuristic workflow enabled mainstream LLM interfaces to correctly flag 9-10 of 10 non-existent references and partially detect metadata corruption. These preliminary results suggest that freely accessible, general-purpose LLMs can achieve high recall on citation verification without reliance on proprietary detection tools.