Halluzinierte Zitate verunreinigen die wissenschaftliche Literatur. Was kann getan werden? – Zehntausende Veröffentlichungen aus dem Jahr 2025 könnten ungültige, von KI generierte Referenzen enthalten, so eine Nature-Analyse.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00969-z
21 Kommentare
Citations should be checked by reviewers and submitters should be banned for making things up. If enough submissions from a given institution are rejected for making up false information, the institution should be blacklisted.
It shouldn’t be hard to automate a simple check for whether cited works exist or not
What I don’t understand is that often I’ll use GPT to find quotes and sources for a reddit comment. GPT will say exactly what I want and provide sources, but when I actually look at the sources either they don’t exist or don’t actually say what I want.
So it seems like I spend more time and effort checking GPT outputs for a reddit comment than these scientists do for a proper studies.
It makes me question how rigorously citations were verified pre-AI.
> What can be done?
Just peer review the damn peer-reviewed articles?
They won’t just feed articles to AI and expect it to check the citations, right?
… right?
There’s no excuse for entirely fake citations. This is why DOIs and citation management software exists.
Now, citing real articles for fake content is an entirely different story and is much harder to detect or police. Always has been.
Just make the authors who cite non-existent works write the works they cited.
the authors should be responsible for it. if multiple citations are clearly ai generated and fake, the paper should be rejected, and the authors should be banned.
Hard(er) consequences for authors of articles with fake citations.
As long as a significant portion gets away with it until much later, with only mild consequences, the practice will continue.
Especially in an academic setting where number of publications into what kind of journals defines one’s standing to a large degree, which in turn strongly influences availability of funds.
I also hope freely and easily applied technology will continue to be developed to automate citation checking.
As long as GenAI can spit out the false nonsense faster than it can be checked, it’ll remain to be a problem…
Retract the offending articles? Never gna happen though
If it’s written by AI it’s not scientific literature.
Generated by ai is a weird new take on an old problem. Academia has always been full of fraud. Peer review has become an self-serving exchange with both getting credit they don’t deserve.
Maybe check the references before publishing stuff lol
The „AI efficiency increase“ is only counted by producing results faster than before. What is totally overlooked that you need much more time to verify and correct the results manually.
(unless your confidence is as big as you ignorance and expect everything produced by AI to be correct)
I am totally surprised scientists did not proofread their papers for fear of being caught using AI or for errors. I don’t have a problem with the using AI but IMHO they should have reviewed the work before submission.
Isn’t this what peer review is for?
What the fuck are we doing here?
The answer to this problem is obvious — any one who submits a publication must declare the use of AI and, if found to include a hallucinated cite or false fact the published authors get a 10 year ban from publishing. In a publish or perish environment, it would basically be the death penalty for second and third authors and this strong motive not to fuck around.
Stop using AI?
I mean, at uni, if my APA 7 citations are wrong, I get dinged pretty hard marks wise. Why is it any different out in the academic world?
I sometimes use AI to find source docs for citations i cannot find or remember. Often more effort getting ai to tell the truth than is worth it
If you publish something under your name with fake citations, I don’t care what software you used to write your paper. You should probably be barred from publishing in reputable journals again.
Identify the first use of fake citations and bollock the authors.
Can we call these „halucitations“? Please? Thank you.