Recently, we have often observed hallucinated citations or references that do not correspond to any existing work in papers under review, preprints, or published papers. Such hallucinated citations pose a serious concern to scientific reliability. When they appear in accepted papers, they may also negatively affect the credibility of conferences. In this study, we refer to hallucinated citations as "HalluCitation" and systematically investigate their prevalence and impact. We analyze all papers published at ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP in 2024 and 2025, including main conference, Findings, and workshop papers. Our analysis reveals that nearly 300 papers contain at least one HalluCitation, most of which were published in 2025. Notably, half of these papers were identified at EMNLP 2025, the most recent conference, indicating that this issue is rapidly increasing. Moreover, more than 100 such papers were accepted as main conference and Findings papers at EMNLP 2025, affecting the credibility.
幻觉引用问题：基于ACL会议中300篇含幻觉引用论文揭示其影响 / HalluCitation Matters: Revealing the Impact of Hallucinated References with 300 Hallucinated Papers in ACL Conferences
这篇论文通过分析ACL等顶级自然语言处理会议2024-2025年的论文，发现有近300篇论文存在虚构的参考文献（即“幻觉引用”），且问题在近期呈快速恶化趋势，严重损害了学术可信度。
源自 arXiv: 2601.18724
