Hallucinated Citations

Problem

Language models trained on academic and legal text are particularly fluent at producing authoritative-looking references that do not exist — invented authors, plausible but wrong digital object identifiers, real-sounding case names that no court ever decided. The citations look correct until somebody clicks them, and end users routinely do not click. In regulated domains like law and medicine, a single hallucinated citation that reaches a customer can trigger sanctions, retractions, or loss of trust the product never recovers from.

Solution

Don't. Wire citations to retrieved-source ids. See citation-streaming, naive-rag, contextual-retrieval. Validate URLs before display.

When to use

• Cite this entry when a system displays model-emitted references without checking them against retrieval results.
• You are already here if users report URLs or paper titles that do not exist.
• Bind citations to retrieved-source ids and validate before display (see citation-streaming, contextual-retrieval).