Bogus AI-gen citations are multiplying rapidly in research
According to Nature, bogus citations generated by AI are becoming a serious problem: “An analysis of 97 million references has found that rates of fabricated citations have climbed steeply since 2023.”
The paper is paywalled but elsewhere at the site, we learn that arXiv is threatening to ban these phantom scholars: “The physical-sciences repository arXiv is banning researchers from posting their manuscripts on the platform for one year if a submission is found to contain references that have been hallucinated by artificial-intelligence tools.” That paper is paywalled too but one gets a sense of quiet panic.
Image Credit: Hein van Tonder - An academic who has read the first paper, Jay Van Bavel, notes, “The rate of fabrication in 2025 was more than 12 times greater than that in 2023!” That includes 28 clinical-trial studies and 79 systematic reviews.
Another study found the same thing:
In a recent study posted to the arXiv preprint server, researchers audited millions of papers and found that an estimated 146,900 hallucinated citations were present in research papers hosted on four major scientific repositories—arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and PubMed Central. These numbers were for 2025 alone.
The hallucinated citations were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references, pointing to a broader pattern of researchers using AI yet failing to fact-check the output.
Sanjukta Mondal, “AI-generated fake citations are flooding scientific literature across publications, scientists warn,” Phys.org, May 18, 2026 Zhenyue Zhao et al, LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations, arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.07723 Open access.
The researchers of the arXiv paper warn, “hallucinations are steadily infiltrating knowledge production at scale, threatening both its reliability and equity. Without intervention, its impact could bleed from the future of scientific discovery to policy and public understanding.”
Ironically, the public has been taught to worry that AI is taking over and will do everything better than humans. In reality, it seems, the AI citation binge — Frankencitations, as one academic calls them — will leave us all with a lot of AI slop to wade through.
