The Case of the Mysterious Citations
2026/02/05 by Amanda Bienz, Carl Pearson, Simon Garcia de Gonzalo · 6 voices · 1 citation
#cs.DL
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Abstract
Mysterious citations are routinely appearing in peer-reviewed publications throughout the scientific community. In this paper, we developed an automated pipeline and examine the proceedings of four major high-performance computing conferences, comparing the accuracy of citations between the 2021 and 2025 proceedings. While none of the 2021 papers contained mysterious citations, every 2025 proceeding did, impacting 2-6% of published papers. In addition, we observe a sharp rise in paper title and authorship errors, motivating the need for stronger citation-verification practice. No author within our dataset acknowledged using AI to generate citations even though all four conference policies required it, indicating current policies are insufficient.
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- A review of the proceedings from four major computer-science conferences showed that none from 2021, and all from 2025, had fake citations. arxiv.org/abs/2602.058... #AI #LLMs #Hallucinations #Miscond [bsky, 102 points, 0 comments]
- New Preprint: The Case of the Mysterious #Citations www.arxiv.org/abs/2602.05867 #GenAI #scholcomm #publishing [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
- The wonderful #LLMAI effect on science writing: #fakecitations everywhere in conferences! #researchintegrity (from that, imagine the reliability of the content) arxiv.org/abs/2602.058... [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
- A new study (arxiv.org/abs/2602.05867) found that up to 6% of papers in recent conferences now have citations to papers that don't even exist. Fake authors. Fake titles. Total hallucinations. The kick [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
- "While none of the 2021 papers contained mysterious citations, every 2025 proceeding did, impacting 2-6% of published papers. In addition, we observe a sharp rise in paper title and authorship errors, [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- That would be interesting, to look at conference papers in different fields, look at fake reference rates. Seen this baby? arxiv.org/abs/2602.058... [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]
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