Journal Submissions Riddled With AI-Created Fake Citations
Journal Submissions Riddled With AI-Created Fake Citations
Publish Date: 2026-03-06 03:03:00
Source Domain: www.insidehighered.com
One journal editor who has served in that position for a year says she’s seeing more AI-generated fake citations in submissions than when she started.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | zbruch/iStock/Getty Images
A few weeks ago, an adjunct education professor reached out to Charles Hodges and Stephanie Moore, two frequent research collaborators, asking for a copy of their 2023 paper titled “Instructional presence and learner success in synchronous and asynchronous eLearning.” The professor hoped to share it with students in his course on e-learning.
Hodges and Moore were happy to share their work, but there was one problem: The paper doesn’t exist.
“The guy sent us the whole reference, and we were like, ‘We never wrote that,’” said Moore, an organization, information and learning sciences professor at the University of New Mexico. “If you try and click on the [digital object identifier] link, it goes nowhere.”
The citation looks completely legitimate. It’s formatted using APA style. It references the Online Learning Journal—a real journal in which Moore has published work—as the paper’s publisher. It even includes a fake DOI link, which leads to a “DOI not found” page. For anyone except the two misattributed authors, it would be nearly impossible to tell the paper is fake without further research. But the citation was hallucinated by artificial intelligence.
Hodges, C. B., & Moore, S. (2023). Instructional presence and learner success in synchronous and asynchronous eLearning. Online Learning Journal, 27(2), 41–62. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v27i2.1234
Also within the last two months, Hodges, a professor of leadership, technology and human development at Georgia Southern University, was asked to review a book proposal on a topic adjacent to his work….
