Phantom References: Hallucinated Citations That Survive Peer Review at Top-Tier Conferences
Large language models can generate polished scientific text that includes unsupported claims, allowing hallucinations to enter the archival record. Assessing this risk via technical statements is difficult and often requires expert judgment, but citations provide a more auditable surface: a reference either resolves to a real scholarly work with compatible authorship, or it does not. We measure citation hallucination in peer-reviewed proceedings using a conservative definition limited to identity-level failures: non-existent works and substantial author-list mismatches. We explicitly exclude ordinary bibliographic drift (e.g., venue/year differences, publication-status updates, minor name...
| Authors | Mark Russinovich, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, Ahmed Salem |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.DL |
| Published | 1 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 July 2026 |
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