How Unique Are Hallucinated Citations Offered by Generative Artificial Intelligence Models?

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 196 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 re-combinations of real authors, journals, dates, and keywords, with duplication occurring in nearly 30% of these hallucinated citations. The paper also reports a structured interrogation of ChatGPT 5-mini about how it generates citations and finds that, absent of verification, the model reconstructs plausible references from learned patterns rather than factual recall. Finally, 110 AI-generated essays on datafication and school governance were examined: while most references were genuine or partly accurate, 29.8% remained fully hallucinated citations, including exact matches to the most common phantom citation, and an additional 29% were partially hallucinated citations. The findings highlight ongoing risks to academic integrity and show that web-enabled AI still does not fully eliminate fabricated references.