Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

It's awful that there are these hallucinated citations, and the researchers who submitted them ought to be ashamed. I also put some of the blame on the boneheaded culture of academic citations.

"Compression has been widely used in columnar databases and has had an increasing importance over time.[1][2][3][4][5][6]"

Ok, literally everyone in the field already knows this. Are citations 1-6 useful? Well, hopefully one of them is an actually useful survey paper, but odds are that 4-5 of them are arbitrarily chosen papers by you or your friends. Good for a little bit of h-index bumping!

So many citations are not an integral part of the paper, but instead randomly sprinkled on to give an air of authority and completeness that isn't deserved.

I actually have a lot of respect for the academic world, probably more than most HN posters, but this particular practice has always struck me as silly. Outside of survey papers (which are extremely under-provided), most papers need many fewer citations than they have, for the specific claims where the paper is relying on prior work or showing an advance over it.

That's only part of the reason that this type of content is used in academic papers. The other part is that you never know what PhD student / postdoc / researcher will be reviewing your paper, which means you are incentivized to be liberal with citations (however tangential) just in case someone is reading your paper, and has the reaction "why didn't they cite this work, of which I had some role in?"

Papers with a fake air of authority of easily dispatched with. What is not so easily dispatched with is the politics of the submission process.

This type of content is fundamentally about emotions (in the reviewer of your paper), and emotions is undeniably a large factor in acceptance / rejection.

Indeed. One can even game review systems by leaving errors in for the reviewers to find so that they feel good about themselves and that they've done their job. The meta-science game is toxic and full of politics and ego-pleasing.