Large scale hallucinated citation problem in published literature

Name: Large scale hallucinated citation problem in published literature
Availability: InStock
Author: cyclecycle

by cyclecycle·Apr 3, 2026·2 points·0 comments

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AI Analysis

○Pass

Important research but this is a news article, not a Show HN software project.

Strengths

•Collaboration with Nature lends credibility to the citation analysis methodology
•20k paper sample from ChatGPT API provides concrete error classification data

Weaknesses

•This is journalism linking to Nature, not a tool or product to evaluate
•Grounded AI company promotion disguised as research sharing

Post Description

Hey, Nick Morley from Grounded AI here (https://groundedai.company/)

We collaborated with Nature to study the extent of fake/frankenstein citations in scholarly literature (from top 5 publishers - Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, Taylor & Francis)

We're estimating hundreds of thousands of papers affected in 2025 with hallucinated citation issues

As part of the work we analysed 20k papers generated with ChatGPT API to figure out which citation errors are characteristic of gen AI use and use that classify the errors we saw

The world's gone mad, publishing is in a nuts state, the training data is poisoned!