Hallucinated citations in scientific papers have surged dramatically since the rise of AI tools. At least 1,46,932 fabricated references generated by artificial intelligence entered the scientific record in 2025 alone, with the vast majority of those detected in preprints surviving peer review and making their way into journal articles, reported TOI.
That is the key finding of a large-scale study conducted by researchers from Cornell University, University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Berkeley, who analysed 111 million citations across 2.5 million research papers published between 2020 and 2025 on arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN and PubMed Central.
