Hallucinated citations are polluting scientific literature. What can be done?
4 hours ago
- #Citation fraud
- #Research integrity
- #AI in academia
- AI is generating hallucinated or fabricated citations in academic papers, with evidence of a sharp increase in non-traceable references in conferences and journals.
- Analyses estimate that 2.6% of papers at some computer-science conferences in 2025 contained at least one potentially hallucinated citation, up from 0.3% in 2024.
- Nature's analysis with Grounded AI suggests tens of thousands of 2025 publications likely contain invalid AI-generated references, with a rough estimate of over 110,000 affected among 7 million scholarly works.
- Publishers are developing tools to screen submissions for problematic references, but detection is challenging due to formatting issues and the overlap between human and AI errors.
- Hallucinated citations often combine elements of real publications ('Frankenstein' citations) or include completely fabricated details, complicating verification and correction processes.