At least 50 hallucinated citations found in ICLR 2026 submissions
Table of contents Peer review is under siege. By speeding up the writing process, LLMs and other AI tools are overwhelming scholarly journals and conferences and the peer review pipeline with hallucinated papers (“AI slop”).These aren’t just issues for low-ranking journals with high acceptance rates. The GPTZero team used our Citation Check tool to scan 300 papers under review by the prestigious International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). We discovered that 50 submissions included at least one obvious hallucitation, which were not previously reported.Worryingly, each of these submissions has already been reviewed by 3-5 peer experts, most of whom missed the fake citation(s). This failure suggests that some of these papers might have been accepted by…
