Study finds 140,000 fake citations in 2025 preprints, worst in social sciences

yian_yin · x · 2026-08-26

A Nature report highlights the growing issue of AI models 'hallucinating' non-existent citations. Researchers analyzing 2.5 million papers and preprints identified over 140,000 fake citations across four repositories in 2025 alone. The problem is most prevalent in social sciences preprint sites, offering the best assessment yet of the scale of citation hallucination.

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →