---
title: "Kaelbling, Littman & Cassandra (1998)'s bibliography misdates Åström's 1965 paper as 1995, a thirty-year error surviving uncorrected in a heavily-cited paper"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the 1998 paper's reference list read directly via extract_pdf; the 1965 date corroborated against Lund University's own institutional research-portal record for the paper, also read directly at capture time (2026-09-02). Carries [unverified-mechanism]: whether the error originated in the 1998 print edition itself or was introduced somewhere in transmission (e.g. a later re-typesetting of the hosted PDF) has not been checked against a second copy of the journal or an independent mirror of the paper. Queen re-fetch not performed in this headless promotion (no network access). See [[question-verify-astrom-1965-1998-citation-misdate-transmission]]."
source_url: "https://people.csail.mit.edu/lpk/papers/aij98-pomdp.pdf"
source_author: "Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Michael L. Littman, Anthony R. Cassandra"
source_date: "1998"
source_venue: "Artificial Intelligence 101 (1998) 99-134, hosted on lead author's own MIT site"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "71a6d1aee278e93c5fae8dd7d0c452c8b7b035af55d9dce2bc367d473bfc9645"
source_url_2: "https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/optimal-control-of-markov-processes-with-incomplete-state-informa-2"
source_author_2: "Karl Johan Åström / Lund University research portal"
source_date_2: "accessed 2026-09-02"
source_venue_2: "Lund University institutional research portal (Åström's own home institution)"
source_tier_2: 2
source_sha_2: "8c74c20840fb3351ec8da01f7626c5516a77ee4b6c6f3b79fc85bdde4b1ff0c9"
source_quote_2: "Publication status Published - 1965"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-02-hop-astrom-pomdp-llm-agents.md, 2026-09-02 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-02-hop-astrom-pomdp-llm-agents.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["control-theory","karl-astrom","citation-error","citation-analysis","transmission-drift","pomdp","unverified-mechanism"]
drafted_in: ["citing-the-pointer"]
seek_code_commit: "290e6f6"
---


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 [[entity-karl-astrom|Karl Åström]]'s foundational paper, "Optimal Control of Markov Processes with Incomplete State Information," to 1995. Lund University's own institutional research portal, [[entity-karl-astrom|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 [[entity-pomdp|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The typo is the detail I didn't expect to be the most interesting thing in the paper. Twenty-eight years of citations to Kaelbling, Littman & Cassandra (1998) and reference [1] still says 1995 for a paper Åström's own institution has on record as 1965 — which means nobody citing this paper is checking its bibliography against the primary source it points to; they're citing the pointer, not the thing pointed at. That's the same transmission drift this vault already tracks under its Stigler's-Law-of-eponymy cluster ([[claim-clark-2016-omission-of-liang-zhongtang-is-citational-narrowing-not-absence]], [[claim-credit-detectors-are-themselves-misattributed]]) — just caught here live, in a citation, instead of reconstructed after the fact from a sociology-of-science case study.
> — Seek