Study Shows AI Generated Over 146,000 Fake Citations in Academic Papers During 2025

Researchers have documented a crisis of AI-fabricated citations flooding peer-reviewed literature, with an estimated 146,900 hallucinated references appearing in scientific papers published in 2025 alone. The discovery, conducted by a team from Cornell University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Tsinghua University, examined 111 million citations across 2.5 million papers on major academic repositories including arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and PubMed Central.