European Science Editing 51: e153973, doi: 10.3897/ese.2025.e153973
Guarding against artificial intelligence – hallucinated citations: The case for full-text reference deposit.
Alex Glynn‡‡ University of Louisville, Louisville, United States of America
Corresponding author: Alex Glynn ( alex.glynn@louisville.edu ) Academic editor: Catherine Jex © Alex Glynn. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Glynn A (2025) Guarding against artificial intelligence – hallucinated citations: The case for full-text reference deposit. European Science Editing 51: e153973. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2025.e153973 |  |
Abstract
The tendency of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to ‘hallucinate’ false information is well known; AI-generated citations to non-existent sources have penetrated the bibliographies of peer-reviewed publications. Drawing from the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines, American judicial contention with generative AI, and the submission of prior art to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the author proposes that journals require authors to submit the full text of each cited source along with their manuscripts, thereby preventing authors from citing material whose full text they cannot produce. This solution requires limited additional work by authors or editors while effectively immunizing journals against hallucinated references.
Keywords
Artificial intelligence, bibliography, citation, large language models, references