These papers went through the full peer review process, where at least three reviewers evaluate each submission. With an acceptance rate of 24.52 percent, these papers beat out around 15,000 other submissions - despite containing fabricated sources.
From "John Doe" to fake DOIs
The documented cases reveal a wide range of errors. The paper "SimWorld" lists the obviously fictional authors "John Doe and Jane Smith." In "Unmasking Puppeteers," DOIs and URLs lead nowhere. A paper on semantic uncertainty quantification contains 15 hallucinated citations, including incomplete arXiv IDs like "arXiv:2305.XXXX."
GPTZero shows how human errors differ from AI errors. Image: GPTZero
GPTZero coined the term "Vibe Citing" for this phenomenon. These are citations that look correct at first glance but fall apart under scrutiny. Common patterns include titles, authors, or sources combined or paraphrased from real publications. Authors, URLs, and DOIs are simply invented. Sometimes author names are extrapolated from initials or titles slightly altered.
