Large language models are now commonly used as partners in scientific writing, and this shift has brought a subtler type of failure: made-up references. Fabricated authors, bogus DOIs, wrongly assigned identifiers, and citations that merge elements from multiple genuine articles are now being inserted into manuscripts at a volume that traditional peer review was never meant to handle. Recent audits reveal that such references have already slipped through the review process and made their way into the published literature, including leading journals and conferences. Automated verification that operates at the speed and scale of modern content production has therefore become a necessary safeguard rather than a convenience. This work presents and evaluates the AtomGPT reference checker (https://atomgpt.org/hallucination_detector), an open, web-accessible tool that verifies citations against the scholarly literature by combining large-language-model field extraction with structured retrieval from Semantic Scholar. For each reference, the tool extracts the bibliographic fields, retrieves the closest matching real papers, and scores the agreement across title, authorship, and venue to produce a graded judgment of whether a citation is trustworthy, partially supported, or likely fabricated. We benchmark the tool against an externally curated set of confirmed hallucinated citations from accepted NeurIPS 2025 papers and find that it reliably flags the great majority of them.

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