This paper investigates how generative AI produces and propagates hallucinated academic references, focusing on the recurring non-existent citation 'Education Governance and Datafication' attributed to Ben Williamson and Nelli Piattoeva. Drawing on 137 accessible source papers identified through Google Scholar and Google searches, the study analyses the structure, recurrence, and onward citation of this phantom reference. It shows that hallucinated citations are not random inventions but patterned recombinations of real authors, journals, dates, and keywords, with duplication occurring in nearly 30% of cases. The paper also reports a structured interrogation of ChatGPT 5-mini about how it generates citations and finds that, absent verification, the model reconstructs plausible references from learned patterns rather than factual recall. Finally, ten AI-generated essays on datafication and school governance were examined: while most references were genuine or partly accurate, 9.2% remained hallucinated, including an exact match to the most common phantom citation. The findings highlight ongoing risks to academic integrity and show that web-enabled AI still does not fully eliminate fabricated references.

翻译：本文探讨了生成式人工智能如何产生并传播虚假的学术参考文献，重点关注Ben Williamson和Nelli Piattoeva所著且反复出现的虚构引用“教育治理与数据化”。基于通过Google Scholar和Google搜索获取的137篇可访问源文献，本研究分析了该幽灵参考文献的结构、重复出现及其被后续引用的情况。研究表明，虚假引用并非随机编造，而是真实作者、期刊、日期和关键词的模式化重组，近30%的案例存在重复现象。本文还对ChatGPT-5-mini进行了结构化质询，探究其生成引用的机制，发现若缺乏验证环节，模型会基于学习到的模式重构看似可信的引用，而非从事实记忆中提取。最后，本文审阅了十篇关于数据化与学校治理的AI生成论文：尽管大多数引用真实或部分准确，仍有9.2%为虚假引用，其中包括与最常见幽灵引文的完全匹配。研究结果揭示了学术诚信面临的持续风险，并表明具备网络检索能力的AI仍未彻底消除虚构参考文献的问题。