The citation catastrophe: Propagation of AI-generated counterfeit citations in scholarship
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Since the arrival of generative AI, citation errors have gotten worse.
“Since the arrival of generative AI things have, if the conclusions of an article subtly titled the citation catastrophe is any indicator, gotten much worse”
From Adding a simple log to in-text citations to strengthen information literacy and argumentation while blocking casual misuse of generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as Camp et al., 2025
Cites
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Timeliness and content of retraction notices for publications by a single research group
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Flagged first, then by citations
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Sorted by citations
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- Authors
- Camp, N. T., Bengtson, J. A., & Sandstrom, J. C.
- Affiliations
- New Mexico State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Camp, Nathan T.
- Venue
- The Journal of Academic Librarianship
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2025-07
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 103065
- ISSN
- 0099-1333 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4410253511
- Semantic Scholar
- a306a30c209ede49f300f3b262ff5166c4176a14
- Cited by
- 12
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 1
- FWCI
- 7.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Update notices
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- Locations
- The Journal of Academic Librarianship (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- AI-generated citations, large language models, citation indexes, citation metrics, academic integrity, citation fraud
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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