The Case of the Mysterious Citations
This work highlights a growing problem of citation integrity in HPC conferences, but the analysis is limited to a specific domain and timeframe, making it incremental.
The authors developed an automated pipeline to detect mysterious citations in HPC conference proceedings, finding that while none appeared in 2021, every 2025 proceeding contained them, affecting 2-6% of papers. They also observed increased title and authorship errors, and noted that no authors acknowledged AI citation generation despite policies requiring it.
Mysterious citations are routinely appearing in peer-reviewed publications throughout the scientific community. In this paper, we developed an automated pipeline and examine the proceedings of four major high-performance computing conferences, comparing the accuracy of citations between the 2021 and 2025 proceedings. While none of the 2021 papers contained mysterious citations, every 2025 proceeding did, impacting 2-6% of published papers. In addition, we observe a sharp rise in paper title and authorship errors, motivating the need for stronger citation-verification practice. No author within our dataset acknowledged using AI to generate citations even though all four conference policies required it, indicating current policies are insufficient.