HalluCitation Matters: Revealing the Impact of Hallucinated References with 300 Hallucinated Papers in ACL Conferences
2026/01/26 by Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe · 7 voices · 5 citations
#cs.CL #cs.AI #cs.DL
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Abstract
Recently, we have often observed hallucinated citations or references that do not correspond to any existing work in papers under review, preprints, or published papers. Such hallucinated citations pose a serious concern to scientific reliability. When they appear in accepted papers, they may also negatively affect the credibility of conferences. In this study, we refer to hallucinated citations as "HalluCitation" and systematically investigate their prevalence and impact. We analyze all papers published at ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP in 2024 and 2025, including main conference, Findings, and workshop papers. Our analysis reveals that nearly 300 papers contain at least one HalluCitation, most of which were published in 2025. Notably, half of these papers were identified at EMNLP 2025, the most recent conference, indicating that this issue is rapidly increasing. Moreover, more than 100 such papers were accepted as main conference and Findings papers at EMNLP 2025, affecting the credibility.
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Discussions
- "We analyze all papers published at ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP in 2024 and 2025... nearly 300 papers contain at least one HalluCitation... Notably, half of these papers were identified at EMNLP 2025 ... in [bsky, 41 points, 3 comments]
- これは確かに98%のNLPerが驚くわ… arxiv.org/abs/2601.18724 [bsky, 4 points, 0 comments]
- 某講義、生成AIを使って課題・レポートをやっても良いよというスタイルで実施しているのですけど。生成AIが作成した文だろうと一文一文をチェックして内容に責任を持てよ、実在しない参考文献 arxiv.org/abs/2601.18724 を引用していないか調べろよ、と言っておいたので。今年から、実在を確認できない参考文献（不完全な書誌情報を含む）を引用しているレポートは再提出にしても良いかも知れないな [bsky, 3 points, 1 comments]
- Hallucinated citations are real. A reminder to (1) control the exact bibliographic info of **every single reference** provided by LLMs that we would want to use, or better (2) not use these systems to [bsky, 3 points, 0 comments]
- HaliuCitation arxiv.org/abs/2601.18724 [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
- Preprint: "HalluCitation Matters: Revealing the Impact of Hallucinated References with 300 Hallucinated Papers in ACL Conferences" www.arxiv.org/abs/2601.18724 #LLMs #GenAI #scholcomm #hallucinations [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
- Yusuke Satai's excellent analysis of conference "hallucitations" illustrates how tasks we view as inauthentic are likely to be outsourced to machines. Students feel the same way. The solution? Increas [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
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