A controversial proposal for hallucinated references

Many prestigious scientific venues have suffered from papers containing hallucinated citations. GPTZero reports finding 100 hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers and 50 hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions . Hallucinated citations are references generated by an AI system that appear credible but point to sources that do not exist or do not support the claims attributed to them. They…