{"id":237344,"date":"2026-05-18T14:06:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T19:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/ai-generated-fake-citations-are-flooding-scientific-literature-across-publications-scientists-warn"},"modified":"2026-05-18T14:06:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T19:06:13","slug":"ai-generated-fake-citations-are-flooding-scientific-literature-across-publications-scientists-warn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/ai-generated-fake-citations-are-flooding-scientific-literature-across-publications-scientists-warn","title":{"rendered":"AI-generated fake citations are flooding scientific literature across publications, scientists warn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ai-generated-fake-citations-are-flooding-scientific-literature-across-publications-scientists-warn2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The citations at the end of a research paper should represent a solid foundation of existing knowledge about a particular field, a pool of peer-reviewed sources built over years of research and study. However, with the increasing use of AI and large language models in writing research papers, there\u2019s a growing chance that the citation someone clicks on may not even exist, and that the study, the source, or even the researchers themselves could be entirely fake.<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2605.07723\" target=\"_blank\">recent study<\/a> posted to the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server, researchers audited millions of papers and found that an estimated 146,900 hallucinated citations were present in research papers hosted on four major scientific repositories\u2014 <i>arXiv<\/i>, <i>bioRxiv<\/i>, <i>SSRN<\/i>, and <i>PubMed Central<\/i>. These numbers were for 2025 alone.<\/p>\n<p>The hallucinated citations were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references, pointing to a broader pattern of researchers using AI yet failing to fact-check the output.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The citations at the end of a research paper should represent a solid foundation of existing knowledge about a particular field, a pool of peer-reviewed sources built over years of research and study. However, with the increasing use of AI and large language models in writing research papers, there\u2019s a growing chance that the citation [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}