A new study in The Lancet shows that the rate of fake citations increased more than 12x between Jan 2023 and Feb 2026.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)00603-3/fulltext
Edited 124d ago
citations
When #AI tools hallucinate citations, their made-up author names are not random. "We show that #LLMs do not merely default to high-probability individual names when generating fictional experts: they produce correlated character ensembles, pairs and trios [of co-authors] whose co-occurrence rates far exceed chance and are consistent across independent generations."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02184
They fool people and tools:
"We identify 1,655 ghost-authored records claiming nonexistent journals with fabricated publication dates…Server-side #DataCite timestamps prove deliberate backdating…These carry real #DOIs…making them harvestable by any scholarly aggregator that ingests DOI metadata."
Edited 35d ago