Above and beyond: An editor wanted authors to know they’d been falsely cited
Like many college professors today, Sarah S. Richardson has seen AI-hallucinated citations in work submitted by her students. But she was surprised when an editor recently contacted her about a hallucinated citation involving her own work. A March 31 email from the editor in chief of Disability Studies Quarterly explained Richardson was one of six … Continue reading Above and beyond: An editor…
Sarah S. Richardson, an editor at Harvard University, recently received an email from the editor-in-chief of Disability Studies Quarterly, apologizing for falsely citing her work in a journal article. The editor revealed that Richardson was one of six scholars whose names had been inaccurately attributed to non-existent publications.
The editor explained that the journal had conducted an audit of all 117 footnotes and found six AI-generated citations. After discovering the errors, the journal promptly retracted the article and contacted the scholars, including Richardson, to inform them of the mistake and take steps to address it. The journal has since implemented a new procedure requiring DOI hyperlinks for all citations, when available, to help reviewers verify sources during copyediting.
Additionally, the journal plans to revise its AI policies and include an AI statement in its instructions for peer reviewers. The incident highlights the potential risks of using AI for generating scholarly content, as the hallucinated citations can lead to disinformation and confusion in academic knowledge systems.
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