LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations (opens in new tab)

Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate plausible but false information across a wide range of contexts, yet the real-world magnitude and consequences of this hallucination problem remain poorly understood. Here we leverage a uniquely verifiable object - scientific citations - to audit 111 million references across 2.5 million papers in arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and PubMed Central. We find a sharp rise in non-existent references followi...