metadata

A few months ago, an undergraduate student came to the library searching for a specific article. She had found a citation in another research paper complete with journal name, volume, issue, and page numbers. Everything looked legitimate. The only missing element was a DOI. At first, I thought it was a simple indexing issue. But when I checked the journal’s volume and issue, I discovered no such article existed. The citation was completely fabricated. It looked real, but it was not real. In the age of generative AI and large language models, this kind of incident is increasingly common in academic research. As we widely utilize AI tools for academic writing and literature review, a new problem has emerged: AI hallucination.