\u201cOne question that all of us have is: \u2018Is AI making science more efficient, helping us do better work, or even the same work, but faster, or is it just creating slop?\u2019 We have all of these papers coming out trying to track the use of [large language models] in science, but none of them really tell us anything about the quality. This is one of the first papers that\u2019s telling us something about the quality of what\u2019s being produced with LLMs, and it\u2019s a signal of slop,\u201d said Misha Teplitskiy, a sociologist of science at the University of Michigan who has studied citation practices<\/a> and AI use among academics<\/a> but was not involved with the paper.<\/p>\n It has become<\/a> a<\/a> common<\/a> experience<\/a> for academics to get alerted of new work citing their research, only to realize it is citing a paper that does not exist. Last year, a widely publicized \u201cMAHA report<\/a>\u201d issued by the White House on its priorities in tackling chronic disease contained several incorrect citations<\/a> that onlookers suspected were generated with artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n The new analysis itself was spurred by an unfortunate experience, said Maxim Topaz, a nurse and health AI researcher at Columbia who led the work. He used an AI chatbot to help edit an editorial he was submitting to a journal. Even after checking to make sure the citations were accurate, after several stages of edits, an editor at the journal flagged an erroneous citation.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\tScience is becoming less disruptive. Is an aging workforce to blame?<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI was deeply embarrassed: I checked for that, and it still almost happened to me. This is how I ended up thinking about other people,\u201d Topaz said. For the new analysis, he sifted through over 2 million papers and 97 million citations using AI tools. He identified around 4,000 fabricated citations among 2,800 papers. That number is quite low, Topaz and others said, but more worrisome is the fact that hallucinated citations are becoming more common. In 2023, 1 in 2,828 papers contained one or more fabricated references, but in 2025 that number had reached 1 in 458 \u2014 a sixfold increase in frequency. During the first seven weeks of 2026, the rate reached 1 in 277 papers.\u00a0<\/p>\n The proliferation of fabricated citations on its own could impact systematic reviews or clinical guidelines that attempt to build off studies. But, it also reflects potentially deeper issues with those studies.\u00a0<\/p>\n The presence of hallucinated citations \u201cshows that there\u2019s people who don\u2019t even want to spend half an hour to check the references of a paper. It shows how fast they want to get published and how desperate they are to get published, which is a reflection of a flawed scholarly evaluation model that puts so much emphasis on peer reviewed publications,\u201d said Mohammad Hosseini, a professor at Northwestern University who studies research integrity and the ethics of AI use<\/a>. It also reflects a change in the culture of citations, from a genuine signal of a researcher engaging with a paper to a box-checking exercise.<\/p>\n \u201cThe more serious issue here is that citation practices are changing with the generative AI use. Previously you would read a paper and then make notes on it. Once you were writing a paper, you would be like, \u2018Is that paper or book relevant? Is that paper not?\u2019 It was a much more reflective process, whereas now people simply use their hunches to prompt ChatGPT or other AI tools, and then they have a bunch of citations that they can sprinkle over their papers, and that is not a healthy practice,\u201d Hosseini said. \u201cThat means that the engagement with the literature is becoming increasingly more superficial, and that is neither good for the researcher, nor for society, nor for our publication practices.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\tGrowing use of guest editors has turned some journals into a \u2018playground of bad science\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n Fabricated citations are not spread evenly across journals. In a dashboard published alongside the paper<\/a>, the researchers report that more than a third of fabricated citations come from two publishers. Topaz declined to name those publishers, but said they are large open-access publishers, which generate revenue by charging authors high prices to publish papers without a paywall<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-1240588765-768x432.jpg\")
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