While Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is proving helpful in many fields, it is now becoming a cause of concern for the credibility of scientific research. According to a recent study, about 1.5 lakh fake and fabricated citations will become part of scientific records in the year 2025. Most of these references are said to be prepared by AI tools.
This shocking revelation has been made in a study conducted by researchers from Cornell University, UCLA and UC Berkeley. The study titled ‘LLM Hallucinations in the Wild’ analyzed 111 million citations from about 25 lakh research papers published between 2020 and 2025. The researchers found that a large number of references existed for which no actual source was available.
The researchers tracked citations whose titles were not found in major academic databases such as Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, and Google Scholar. The data after 2022 was then compared with the old error baseline. Investigation revealed that false and fabricated information generated by AI tools is the main reason for this increase.
According to the study, the highest increase in fake citations was seen from mid-2024. Experts say that if this is not controlled, the credibility and quality of scientific research can be seriously affected.
