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Cited by 39Academic integrity and plagiarismscientometrics and bibliometrics researchAcademic Publishing and Open Access

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?

Naddaf, Miryam, Quill, Elizabeth·2026·Nature
DOI 10.1038/d41586-026-00969-z
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Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/d41586-026-00969-z

Cites

7 of 7 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

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?

  • As researchers increasingly use LLMs to source citations, they risk introducing hallucinated artifacts into the permanent record.

    “As researchers increasingly use LLMs to source citations, they risk introducing hallucinated artifacts into the permanent record [15].”

    From LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations (2026) · cites this paper as [15]

  • Scientific references span vast sources, creating a false positive challenge that often requires manual validation.

    “scientific references span vast sources (e.g., non-English journals and media outlets), creating a 'false positive' challenge that often requires manual validation [15].”

    From LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations (2026) · cites this paper as [15]

  • A recent Nature analysis reported that tens of thousands of publications from 2025 may contain invalid references generated by artificial intelligence.

    “For example, a recent Nature analysis reported that tens of thousands of publications from 2025 may contain invalid references generated by artificial intelligence (Naddaf & Quill, 2026).”

    From Detecting Hallucinated and Suspicious Citations: What Current Tools Can and Cannot Do (2026) · cites this paper as Naddaf & Quill, 2026

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Related

Authors
Naddaf, M., & Quill, E.
Venue
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2026-04-01
Volume
652
Issue
8108
Pages
26-29
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
DOI
10.1038/d41586-026-00969-z
OpenAlex
W7147159231
Cited by
36
References
6
Citations by year
2026: 36
FWCI
204.25
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
Locations
  • Nature (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
Keywords
AI-generated references, citation errors, scholarly publishing, large language models, research integrity, bibliographic references

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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