Erja Moore, an independent researcher based in Finland, came across the article published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics while looking into a whistleblowing case in that country. “I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”

Moore ended up analyzing all of the paper’s 29 references and found at least 19 of them appear to be fabricated, by her count. Eighteen of the Google Scholar links in the online reference section turn up empty. What she found in many cases were a nonexistent article title by authors who have written other papers on the reference’s topic; a similarly titled article in a completely different journal by different authors; or (and sometimes, and) a journal volume, issue and page number leading to a totally different article than the one in the references.

The article joins a long list of publications flagged for fake references, which can be hallucinations generated by a large language model like ChatGPT.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/02/fake-references-chatgpt-journal-academic-ethics-springer-nature-whistleblowing/

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