Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing.

The paper, published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics, explored “the whistleblowing experiences of individuals with disabilities in Ethiopian public educational institutions.”

Erja Moore, an independent researcher based in Finland, came across the article 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 Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”

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

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. Moore dug in further, searching for the article titles, common works by the authors, and the journal’s volumes and issues to triple check whether some portion of the reference may have been incorrect rather than made up.

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...

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