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July 24, 2026Journal of the Association for Information Science and TechnologyOpen Access

Phantom citations: An empirical study of non‐existent and unverifiable references in scholarly literature

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Authors

CHChengcheng HanSMSathiamoorthy ManoharanXYXinfeng Ye

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Overview

This empirical study detects unverifiable references in peer-reviewed papers, highlighting citation integrity concerns.

Key Points

  • The study aims to develop a tool to identify non-existent and unverifiable references in scholarly literature.
  • Developed a reference verification pipeline combining reference extraction with DOI/URL checks and cross-database matching.
  • Applied the tool to a corpus of 3201 peer-reviewed papers published between 2023 and 2025.
  • Identified 69 papers (2.16%) with at least one unverifiable reference under the verification protocol.
  • Highlights the potential for misleading readers due to unverifiable references that can proliferate in citation chains.

Cite This Study

Han et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a630224395161722cd1689fhttps://doi.org/10.1002/asi.70104
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