Science, now with 110,000 made-up sources!
When the citations are fiction, the science built on top of them isn’t far behind.
Turns out the problem with AI in science isn’t just that it occasionally gets things wrong, it’s that AI confidently invents sources that don’t exist, and those fake citations are showing up in real, peer-reviewed research by the tens of thousands.
Over the past year, efforts have begun turning up such hallucinated citations in the literature. One analysis of nearly 18,000 papers accepted by three computer-science conferences found a sharp increase in references that cannot be traced to actual scholarly publications3. The results, reported in January, indicated that 2.6% of papers in 2025 had a least one potentially hallucinated citation — up from about 0.3% in 2024. Another analysis, released in February, estimated that 2–6% of papers in four other 2025 computer-science conferences included references with rephrased titles or citations of publications that the authors couldn’t verify by searching through databases and journal archives4.
And although the scale of the problem remains uncertain, it’s clear that not only conferences are affected. An exclusive analysis conducted by Nature‘s news team, in collaboration with Grounded AI, a company based in Stevenage, UK, suggests that at least tens of thousands of 2025 publications, including journal papers and books, as well as conference proceedings, probably contain invalid references generated by AI.
At some point, “check your sources” stops being advice and starts being a full-time job. When the citations are fiction, the science built on top of them isn’t far behind.