Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature

Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.
NEWS FEATURE
01 April 2026

By Miryam Naddaf & Elizabeth Quill

Earlier this year, computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac received a notification from Google Scholar that one of his publications had been cited in a paper published in the International Dental Journal1. That was unexpected, because his research on spotting fabricated papers doesn’t typically intersect with dentistry. “I was very surprised to see that I couldn’t recognize my own reference,” says Cabanac, who is based at the University of Toulouse in France.

The title in the citation resembled that of a preprint2 he had posted in 2021 and never published formally, but the journal was listed as Nature and the DOI — the unique identifier assigned by publishers and preprint repositories — did not lead to the original preprint. “I got very concerned,” adds Cabanac, who immediately suspected that the citation had been hallucinated by artificial intelligence ...

One analysis of nearly 18,000 papers accepted by three computer-science conferences found a sharp increase in references that cannot be traced to actual scholarly publications. The results, reported in January, indicated that 2.6% of papers in 2025 had a least one potentially hallucinated citation — up from about 0.3% in 2024. Another analysis, released in February, estimated that 2–6% of papers in four other 2025 computer-science conferences included references with rephrased titles or citations of publications that the authors couldn’t verify by searching through databases and journal archives ...

Citation errors are not new to academic publishing. “Even before generative AI, we already had so many inaccuracies in citations,” says Mohammad Hosseini, who studies research ethics and integrity at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. Issues have tended to include misspelling of authors’ names or errors in the year of publication, the title of the journal or the DOI. Another issue has been discrepancies between the information in the cited work and the details given by the paper citing it.

“Now the problem is not just inaccuracy, it’s about fake citations. It’s about fabricated citations, which is a whole different problem,” says Hosseini ...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00969-z

The tech-bros are ready to help flood the zone with bullshit!