Editors’ Summary: In this post, the author considers the growing problem of ‘zombie citations’, or citations that may have been “hallucinated” or constructed by generative AI. He uses an example of a reference to an article that he never wrote, and traces the citations of it through Google Scholar. Williamson demonstrates how the non-existent paper appears to have a social half-life, as it is not living but not quite dead either, shambling on mindlessly and infecting the growing number of papers that treat it as a citable scholarly source. He ties zombie citations to the concept of ‘scholarslop,’ or AI-generated content that mimics academic discourse whilst lacking genuine scholarly insight.
Editors’ Choice: Tracing the social half-life of a zombie citation | code acts in education
