When #AI tools hallucinate citations, their made-up author names are not random. "We show that #LLMs do not merely default to high-probability individual names when generating fictional experts: they produce correlated character ensembles, pairs and trios [of co-authors] whose co-occurrence rates far exceed chance and are consistent across independent generations."
arxiv.org/abs/2606.02184

They fool people and tools:

"We identify 1,655 ghost-authored records claiming nonexistent journals with fabricated publication dates…Server-side #DataCite timestamps prove deliberate backdating…These carry real #DOIs…making them harvestable by any scholarly aggregator that ingests DOI metadata."

#Citations #Hallucinations #ScholComm

The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing

These names do not exist. Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen have appeared as volcano experts, astronauts, thriller protagonists, podcast hosts, and academic co-authors across hundreds of independently produced AI-generated documents, never having lived.

^arXiv.org

Watching with interest:

"Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges."
retractionwatch.com/2026/07/31…

"A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant #APCs. The case…claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa [Taylor & Francis] forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles."

#Litigation #Publishers #ScholComm #USLaw

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

iStock A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges…

^{Retraction Watch}