Recently, we have often observed hallucinated citations or references that do not correspond to any existing work in papers under review, preprints, or published papers. Such hallucinated citations pose a serious concern to scientific reliability. When they appear in accepted papers, they may also negatively affect the credibility of conferences. In this study, we refer to hallucinated citations as "HalluCitation" and systematically investigate their prevalence and impact. We analyze all papers published at ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP in 2024 and 2025, including main conference, Findings, and workshop papers. Our analysis reveals that nearly 300 papers contain at least one HalluCitation, most of which were published in 2025. Notably, half of these papers were identified at EMNLP 2025, the most recent conference, indicating that this issue is rapidly increasing. Moreover, more than 100 such papers were accepted as main conference and Findings papers at EMNLP 2025, affecting the credibility.

翻译：近期，我们在审稿论文、预印本或已发表论文中频繁观察到幻觉引用现象，即引用的参考文献与现有研究成果不符。此类幻觉引用对科学可靠性构成严重威胁。当它们出现在已录用论文中时，还可能损害学术会议的公信力。本研究将此类幻觉引用称为"HalluCitation"，并系统性地探究其普遍性与影响。我们分析了2024年至2025年ACL、NAACL和EMNLP会议发表的所有论文，包括主会论文、Findings论文集及研讨会论文。分析显示，近300篇论文至少包含一处幻觉引用，其中绝大多数发表于2025年。值得注意的是，半数存在该问题的论文出现在最新举办的EMNLP 2025会议上，表明该现象正快速蔓延。此外，EMNLP 2025主会及Findings论文集中有超过100篇此类论文被录用，已对学术公信力产生实质影响。