● Covered by 1 source · 1 reportMedium impact1 negative
Research Papers with Fabricated Authors and LLM-Generated Content Accepted as Orals
Key points
- 15 out of 22 reviewed papers contained fabricated citations or LLM-generated content.
- Two papers with fake authors were accepted as oral presentations.
- Studies show tens of thousands of publications may contain invalid AI-generated references.
- Peer reviews often fail to catch hallucinated citations, even in published versions.
Prevalence of Fabricated Content in Submissions
Reviewers found that 15 out of 22 paper submissions across NeurIPS, WACV, and TerraBytes contained fabricated citations, fabricated author lists, or were clearly LLM-generated. This included hallucinated technical jargon, nonsensical writing, and irrelevant citations. The acceptance of two such papers as orals underscores the difficulty in identifying these issues during the review process.
Widespread Problem in Academic Publishing
The issue of AI-generated and fraudulent content is not isolated. A Nature analysis found tens of thousands of 2025 publications likely contain invalid AI-generated references. An audit of arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and PubMed Central estimated approximately 146,900 hallucinated citations in 2025, often included by early-career researchers and small teams. These hallucinations frequently persist into published versions, with 85.3% remaining in bioRxiv preprints.
Review Process Vulnerabilities
The integrity of the peer review process is compromised by these submissions. An audit in The Lancet covering 2.5 million biomedical papers showed a six-fold increase in papers with at least one fabricated reference from 2023 to 2025. Additionally, an analysis of NeurIPS 2025 found that 1% of accepted papers contained hallucinated citations that passed multiple expert reviewers. The problem extends to reviews themselves, with one analysis of ICLR 2026 reviews indicating 21% were fully AI-generated and over half had some AI involvement.
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Primary sources
GitHub quarto-dev/quarto-cli GitHub giscus/giscus GitHub isaaccorley/skills GitHub vercel-labs/skills arXiv 2605.07723 arXiv 2602.05930Reporting from
Two research papers containing fabricated authors and LLM-generated content were accepted as oral presentations at conferences, highlighting a growing issue in academic publishing. This indicates a significant challenge for peer review processes in detecting AI-generated and fraudulent submissions, impacting the integrity of scientific literature.