Fabricated citations

Introduction

ImportantProblem statement

Fabricated references (references whose claimed titles correspond to no existing publication) can arise from paper mill activity, intentional misconduct, or uncritical use of artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools (Topaz, Roguin, et al. 2026).

• In the context of AI/LLMs, the terms “hallucinated” “confabulated”, “phantom”, and “ghost” references have also been used.

Key resources

Note“Fabricated citations: an audit”

Analysis by Topaz, Roguin, et al. (2026)

NoteCheckIfExist

Automatic reference checker by Abbonato (2026). Per developer, may occasionally misclassify authentic references, so flagged items should be manually checked.

Note“Guarding against AI-hallucinated citations”

Proposed remedy by Glynn (2025)

References

Abbonato, Diletta. 2026. “CheckIfExist: Detecting Citation Hallucinations in the Era of AI-Generated Content.” 2602.15871. Version 1. Preprint, arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2602.15871.

Glynn, Alex. 2025. “Guarding Against Artificial Intelligence -- Hallucinated Citations: The Case for Full-Text Reference Deposit.” European Science Editing 51 (July): e153973. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2025.e153973.

Han, Chengcheng, Sathiamoorthy Manoharan, Xinfeng Ye, and Ulrich Speidel. 2026. “Phantom Citations: An Empirical Study of Non-Existent and Unverifiable References in Scholarly Literature.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Hoboken), ahead of print, July 22. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.70104.

Topaz, Maxim, Nir Roguin, Pallavi Gupta, Zhihong Zhang, and Laura-Maria Peltonen. 2026. “Fabricated Citations: An Audit Across 2·5 Million Biomedical Papers.” The Lancet 407 (10541): 1779–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(26)00603-3.

Topaz, Maxim, Zhihong Zhang, Pallavi Gupta, Nir Roguin, and Laura-Maria Peltonen. 2026. “Fabricated References Are Twice as Common in medRxiv Preprints as in Peer-Reviewed Articles.” Journal of Internal Medicine (Hoboken) 300 (3): 379–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.70139.