Verifying the Accuracy of Citations Generated by AI Chatbots

September 29th, 2026

U-M Library Workshop

Kathryn Vanderboll, MLIS

Taubman Health Sciences Library

Housekeeping

• This session will be recorded.
• Feel free to put questions into the chat.
• After this session, you will receive:
• The recording
• A copy of the slides

2

About me

• Health sciences librarian
• Frequently asked for help finding articles
• Teach citation practices and citation management software
• Regularly experiment with AI research tools

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What AI tools are we talking about?

Multipurpose generative AI chatbot tools like:

• ChatGPT
• U-M GPT
• Gemini
• Claude
• Copilot

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What's the problem?

• These chatbot tools can:
• Suggest users cite works that may not exist at all
• Format citations that may be incomplete or contain incorrect details
• Incorrectly summarize real articles
• Claim false information comes comes from real articles

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A note on terminology

• "Fake citations"
• "Fabricated citations"
• "Hallucinated citations"
• "Counterfeit citations"
• "Phantom citations"

A citation where the title does not match any real papers written by the listed author(s).

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Another note on terminology

• "Citation errors"

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A citation where the title and author(s) match a real paper, but other citation details may be incorrect (journal, volume, issue, type of source, etc.)

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Why does this happen?

Chatbot tools like ChatGPT are language prediction tools, suggesting answers based on the probability of words appearing next to each other.

Cabezas-Clavijo, Á., & Sidorenko-Bautista, P. (2026). Assessing the performance of 8 AI chatbots in bibliographic reference retrieval: Grok and DeepSeek outperform ChatGPT, but none are entirely accurate. Journal of Data and Information Science, 11(2), 342–354. https://doi.org/10.1515/jdis-2025-0326

Gibney, E. (2025). Can researchers stop AI making up citations? Nature, 645(8081), 569–570. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02853-8

Linardon, J., Jarman, H. K., McClure, Z., Anderson, C., Liu, C., & Messer, M. (2025). Influence of topic familiarity and prompt specificity on citation fabrication in mental health research using large language models: Experimental study. JMIR Mental Health, 12(1), e80371. https://doi.org/10.2196/80371

Walters, W. H., & Wilder, E. I. (2023). Fabrication and errors in the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 14045. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5

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The impact…

• Students may submit work with fake citations
• Fake citations appear in preprints and journal submissions
• Articles with fake citations are making it into the published literature

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Camp, N. T., Bengtson, J. A., & Sandstrom, J. C. (2025). The citation catastrophe: Propagation of AI-generated counterfeit citations in scholarship. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 51(4), 103065. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103065

Naddaf, M., & Quill, E. (2026). Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Nature, 652(8108), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00969-z

Topaz, M., Roguin, N., Gupta, P., Zhang, Z., & Peltonen, L.-M. (2026). Fabricated citations: An audit across 2.5 million biomedical papers. The Lancet, 407(10541), 1779–1781. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(26)00603-3

Sevryugina, Y. V., & Vargas, D. (2026). Teaching research integrity through verification of AI-generated references: An activity for upper-level chemistry courses. Journal of Chemical Education, 103(5), 2610–2620. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5c01620

Whitford, E. (2026, May 3). Journal submissions riddled with AI-created fake citations. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/books-publishing/2026/03/06/journal-submissions-riddled-ai-created-fake-citations

Many instances covered by Retraction Watch reporting (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

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Reasons for the problem

• Unintentional error or purposeful misconduct
• Pressure to publish / finish assignments quickly
• Lack of understanding of how to read and synthesize academic works
• Uncritically trusting generative AI tools
• Guidance struggling to keep up with rapid technological change
• No easy solution for automated reference verification

Badalova, F., & Mayr, P. (2026). Detecting hallucinated and suspicious citations: What current tools can and cannot do (arXiv:2607.22693). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.22693

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Why isn't it easy?

• Variations due to citation styles
• Fake citations often copy elements of real citations
• Languages other than English / translation variations
• How to access the "complete" academic corpus?

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Naddaf, M., & Quill, E. (2026). Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Nature, 652(8108), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00969-z

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Who's verifying the citations?

For journal manuscripts:

• The authors?
• The journal editors?
• The peer reviewers?
• Each reader?

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For student projects:

• The student authors?
• Student peer reviewers (if applicable)?
• The faculty / TAs?

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How to verify citations

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When you have a DOI

1. Click on the DOI of the citation
2. Compare the elements of the citation to the journal's website.

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Examples

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bflfIGOLhxXLqYPPgN0U4Hw-XlXPptYgxd3irJTnQdw/edit?usp=sharing

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If the DOIs are not hyperlinks

Example:

doi:10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5

Replace doi: with doi.org/

doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5

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If there's no DOI at all

Or the DOI takes you to a different article than you expected…

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1. Search for the article title on Google Scholar
2. If title matches, follow the Google Scholar link to the journal's webpage

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If no Google Scholar match

1. Search for the author's website, CV, ORCiD, or Google Scholar profile
2. Run an exact Google search for the title of the article (quotation marks)

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My example (author search)

• Searched for the authors (Fung, L., Richards, J., & Wenzel, J.)
• Lillia Fung published a different paper on the topic of interprofessional practice.
• Jennifer Wenzel has published an article that mentions interprofessional conflict.
• J. Richards might be Janet Richards, who has published several articles on interprofessional education, such as this one.
• No papers where these three authors collaborated.

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Try an exact title search

• Exact Google search for title of article, with quotation marks

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Alternatives for finding literature

Instead of multipurpose genAI chatbots, try…

• Library catalog or academic database searching
• Find your librarian here

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• Specialized AI tools for finding academic literature ("AI discovery tools")
• Consensus
• Elicit
• Undermind
• ResearchRabbit

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A note on AI discovery tools

• Limited number of results retrieved
• The search is a black box
• Why are you getting these results?
• Are they the most relevant?
• What are you missing?
• The search is not reproducible

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A final word of caution

• Generative AI tools can also make errors when summarizing or extracting information from real articles

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• Compare the original full text to any generative AI summaries

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Alternatives for citation formatting

Citation management software can help you:

• Keep track of the sources you're using for your research
• Organize the sources you've found with folders or tags
• Share those sources with collaborators
• Read and annotate full text
• Automatically create a draft bibliography and/or in-text citations/footnotes in a citation style of your choice.

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What next?

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Learn citation management software

• Zotero (free tool)
• Upcoming workshop registration link (November 11th at 11am)
• Recording of past workshop
• Step by step tutorial
• EndNote (subscription tool paid for by some departments)
• Upcoming workshop registration link (October 13th at 1pm)
• Recording of past workshop
• Contact citationmanagement@umich.edu to schedule class/group instruction

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For instructors

The library creates and maintains many asynchronous modules that can be added to your Canvas course.

• GenAI and Library Research
• Read a Scholarly Article
• Introduction to Citation
• Introduction to Zotero

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Full bibliography

Badalova, F., & Mayr, P. (2026). Detecting hallucinated and suspicious citations: What current tools can and cannot do (arXiv:2607.22693). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.22693

Cabezas-Clavijo, Á., & Sidorenko-Bautista, P. (2026). Assessing the performance of 8 AI chatbots in bibliographic reference retrieval: Grok and DeepSeek outperform ChatGPT, but none are entirely accurate. Journal of Data and Information Science, 11(2), 342–354. https://doi.org/10.1515/jdis-2025-0326

Camp, N. T., Bengtson, J. A., & Sandstrom, J. C. (2025). The citation catastrophe: Propagation of AI-generated counterfeit citations in scholarship. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 51(4), 103065. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103065

Gibney, E. (2025). Can researchers stop AI making up citations? Nature, 645(8081), 569–570. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02853-8

Linardon, J., Jarman, H. K., McClure, Z., Anderson, C., Liu, C., & Messer, M. (2025). Influence of topic familiarity and prompt specificity on citation fabrication in mental health research using large language models: Experimental study. JMIR Mental Health, 12(1), e80371. https://doi.org/10.2196/80371

Naddaf, M., & Quill, E. (2026). Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Nature, 652(8108), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00969-z

Sevryugina, Y. V., & Vargas, D. (2026). Teaching research integrity through verification of AI-generated references: An activity for upper-level chemistry courses. Journal of Chemical Education, 103(5), 2610–2620. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5c01620

Topaz, M., Roguin, N., Gupta, P., Zhang, Z., & Peltonen, L.-M. (2026). Fabricated citations: An audit across 2.5 million biomedical papers. The Lancet, 407(10541), 1779–1781. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(26)00603-3

Walters, W. H., & Wilder, E. I. (2023). Fabrication and errors in the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 14045. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5

Whitford, E. (2026, May 3). Journal submissions riddled with AI-created fake citations. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/books-publishing/2026/03/06/journal-submissions-riddled-ai-created-fake-citations

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Questions?

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