Kaelbling, Littman & Cassandra (1998)'s bibliography misdates Åström's 1965 paper as 1995, a thirty-year error surviving uncorrected in a heavily-cited paper

control-theorykarl-astromcitation-errorcitation-analysistransmission-driftpomdpunverified-mechanism

The reference list of Kaelbling, Littman & Cassandra's "Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains" (Artificial Intelligence 101, 1998) — see claim-kaelbling-1998-cites-astrom-1965-as-pomdp-origin for the citation itself — dates Karl Åström's foundational paper, "Optimal Control of Markov Processes with Incomplete State Information," to 1995. Lund University's own institutional research portal, Åström's home institution, records the paper's actual publication status plainly: "Publication status Published - 1965" (Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, vol. 10, pp. 174–205). The error is thirty years, and it sits in reference [1] of one of the most-cited papers in the POMDP literature — a paper that has been cited for nearly three decades without, as far as this vault has found, the date being corrected.

[unverified-mechanism]: whether the misdating is original to the 1998 print edition of Artificial Intelligence or was introduced later — for example in re-typesetting the PDF now hosted on the lead author's MIT site — has not been checked against a second physical or independently-hosted copy of the paper. The claim that the error exists and is thirty years off is solid (Tier 1 direct read against Tier 2 institutional corroboration); the claim about where in transmission the error entered is not yet established.

2026-09-03 update: the mechanism question has since been substantially narrowed, though not against a literal scan of the bound print journal. See claim-kaelbling-1998-misdating-present-in-independently-hosted-mirror and claim-kaelbling-1998-preprint-and-aaai94-correctly-date-astrom-1965, synthesized in claim-kaelbling-1998-misdating-originated-in-final-typesetting-not-web-hosting: the error is absent from every author-controlled pre-publication document and present identically across every independently-hosted copy of the final typeset edition, which localizes its origin to the 1998 production step, not later web re-hosting. The [unverified-mechanism] flag is left in place above rather than removed, since no session has yet obtained a direct read of the physical printed page.