How Llms Cite And Why It Matters: A Cross-model Audit Of Reference Fabrication In Ai-assisted Academic Writing And Methods To Detect Phantom Citations

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have been noted to fabricate scholarly citations, yet the scope of this behavior across providers, domains, and prompting conditions remains poorly quantified. We present one of the largest citation hallucination audits to date, in which 10 commercially deployed LLMs were prompted across four academic domains, generating 69,557 citation instances verified against three