Why Llms Invent Academic Citations That Don T Exist And How To Stop Them

Originally published on CoreProse KB-incidents 1. From “Ghost References” to a Systemic Integrity Crisis Ghost references are citations to works that do not exist. They differ from: Citation unfaithfulness : real papers cited for unsupported claims. “Zombie” or low‑quality but real papers. [1][11] Humans have long produced bogus references via typos, copying, or paper mills. LLMs change the scale : one prompt can yield dozens of plausible but nonexistent citations that flow into papers, theses, and reports with minimal friction. [1][3] 📊 By the numbers Across 13 state-of-the-art LLMs tested on citation generation in 40 domains, hallucination rates ranged from 14.23% to 94.93%. [11] Other studies report 18–69% fabricated references, including one medical study where 47% of ChatGPT references were made up and only 7% were both real and accurate. [2] GhostCite’s analysis of 2.2M citations in 56,381 AI/ML and security papers (2020–2025) found: [11] 1.07% of papers (604) contained invalid o