Journalist Vibe-Researches a Fake Paper, Gets Caught by 24 Ghost Citations
Ourtake
Ghost citations: the one part of the paper that was actually fabricated, and the part that got caught.
What happened
Journalist Benjamin Skuse used free ChatGPT and Gemini to generate a fake optical soliton paper and submitted it to IEEE Access, where it was rejected after checkers found roughly 12 to 24 hallucinated references. He then tested Analemma's FARS system, which produced a paper with no fake references but was still flagged for heavy reliance on preprints and figure errors.