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arXiv · 2602.05867

The Case of the Mysterious Citations

Amanda Bienz·Carl Pearson·Simon Garcia de Gonzalo
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Abstract

Mysterious citations are routinely appearing in peer-reviewed publications throughout the scientific community. In this paper, we developed an automated pipeline and examine the proceedings of four major high-performance computing conferences, comparing the accuracy of citations between the 2021 and 2025 proceedings. While none of the 2021 papers contained mysterious citations, every 2025 proceeding did, impacting 2-6% of published papers. In addition, we observe a sharp rise in paper title and authorship errors, motivating the need for stronger citation-verification practice. No author within our dataset acknowledged using AI to generate citations even though all four conference policies required it, indicating current policies are insufficient.

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Amanda Bienz, Carl Pearson, Simon Garcia de Gonzalo. 2026-02-05. The Case of the Mysterious Citations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05867

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