Evaluating the Integrity of LLM-Generated Citations: Prevalence and Risks of Fabricated References in Scientific Literature

Large Language Models have become important in our lives, and academia is not agnostic to this trend, offering tools like text rephrasing and summarisation. However, this integration raises significant concerns regarding the integrity of science. In this paper, we investigate hallucinations of LLMs when generating scientific references. Using nine LLMs, we generated a dataset of 74,196 Bib references to quantify and analyse fabricated references, focusing on distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic hallucinations. Also, we extracted and analysed 127,063 references from 3541 published papers in 2023 to assess the prevalence of fake bibliographic data. Our manual verification process identified eight instances of fabricated references. While the overall rate is statistically low, the mere existence of fabricated content in the peer-reviewed literature is a critical integrity issue, demonstrating a vulnerability in current academic validation systems. The significance of our finding is not the statistical prevalence but rather the necessity for rigorous, human-validated processes to prevent the injection of spurious citations regardless of their source.