Limitation or failure · General science · Computer science · Social science
Large-scale audit finds hallucinated citations entering scientific literature
An audit of non-existent references across papers in arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and PubMed Central.
Summary
Zhao and coauthors audit scientific references at large scale and report a sharp rise in non-existent citations after widespread LLM adoption. The study links the errors to AI-assisted writing signatures and argues that moderation and publication safeguards catch only part of the problem.
AI role
Large language models are identified as a plausible source of fabricated citations in AI-assisted scholarly writing workflows.
Narrative role
This is a high-signal caution event because it measures a concrete failure mode entering the scholarly record at scale, not just a lab benchmark of hallucination.
Caveat
The work is a preprint and infers LLM involvement from patterns rather than observing every manuscript production workflow directly.