ArticlePsychiatry research2023
ChatGPT and Bard exhibit spontaneous citation fabrication during psychiatry literature search.
Article in Psychiatry research, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 124 citations in OpenAlex.
- Use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in psychiatry and mental health care: a systematic review.Acta neuropsychiatrica · 2024Pooled it
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- Artificial Authority: The Promise and Perils of LLM Judges in Healthcare.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Comparison of three large language models' ability to assess the risk of bias using ROBINS-I tool.BMJ digital health & AI · 2026Article
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- Faster, better?: Testing artificial intelligence accuracy for neurosurgical literature analysis.Medicine · 2025Article
- Influence of Topic Familiarity and Prompt Specificity on Citation Fabrication in Mental Health Research Using Large Language Models: Experimental Study.JMIR mental health · 2025Article
- Automating the extraction of otology symptoms from clinic letters: a methodological study using natural language processing.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2025Article
- Clinical Management of Wasp Stings Using Large Language Models: Cross-Sectional Evaluation Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Will ChatGPT-4 improve the quality of medical abstracts?Paediatrics & child health · 2025Article
- Performance of Artificial Intelligence in Addressing Questions Regarding the Management of Pediatric Supracondylar Humerus Fractures.Journal of the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is a large language model (LLM), which comprises a neural network that has learned information and patterns of language use from large amounts of text on the internet. ChatGPT, introduced by OpenAI, responds to human queries in a conversational manner. Here, we aimed to assess whether ChatGPT could reliably produce accurate references to supplement the literature search process. We describe our March 2023 exchange with ChatGPT, which generated thirty-five citations, two of which were real. 12 citations were similar to actual manuscripts (e.g., titles with incorrect author lists, journals, or publication years) and the remaining 21, while plausible, were in fact a pastiche of multiple existent manuscripts. In June 2023, we re-tested ChatGPT's performance and compared it to that of Google's GPT counterpart, Bard 2.0. We investigated performance in English, as well as in Spanish and Italian. Fabrications made by LLMs, including erroneous citations, have been called "hallucinations"; we discuss reasons for which this is a misnomer. Furthermore, we describe potential explanations for citation fabrication by GPTs, as well as measures being taken to remedy this issue, including reinforcement learning. Our results underscore that output from conversational LLMs should be verified.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.