Hallucinated Citations in the Published Scientific Literature: A Large-Scale Analysis in Collaboration with Nature
Nick Morley, Konrad Rzezniczak, Joe Shockman (Grounded AI), Miryam Naddaf, Elizabeth Quill (Nature)
We collaborated with Nature to analyse more than 4,000 scholarly publications from 2025, using our citation verification platform Veracity to estimate the prevalence of AI-hallucinated references in the published literature. The study identifies characteristic error fingerprints and estimates that more than 110,000 (1.65%) publications from 2025 contain at least one AI-hallucinated citation.
citation verificationresearch integrityscholarly publishinghallucination detection