Kinda gives the whole game away, doesn’t it? “It doesn’t actually matter if the citations are hallucinated.”

In fairness, NeurIPS is just saying out loud what everyone already knows. Most citations in published science are useless junk: it’s either mutual back-scratching to juice h-index, or it’s the embedded and pointless practice of overcitation, like “Human beings need clean water to survive (Franz, 2002)”.

Really, hallucinated citations are just forcing a reckoning which has been overdue for a while now.

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fc417fc802 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Most citations in published science are useless junk:

Can't say that matches my experience at all. Once I've found a useful paper on a topic thereafter I primarily navigate the literature by traveling up and down the citation graph. It's extremely effective in practice and it's continued to get easier to do as the digitization of metadata has improved over the years.

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jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There should be a way to drop any kind of circular citation ring from the indexes.

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gcr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's tough because some great citations are hard to find/procure still. I sometimes refer to papers that aren't on the Internet (eg. old wonderful books / journals).

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jacquesm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But that actually strengthens those citiations. The I scratch your back you scratch mine ones are the ones I'm getting at and that is quite hard to do with old and wonderful stuff, the authors there are probably not in a position to reciprocate by virtue of observing the grass from the other side.

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gcr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it's a hard problem. The semanticscholar folks are doing the sort of work that would allow them to track this; I wonder if they've thought about it.

A somewhat-related parable: I once worked in a larger lab with several subteams submitting to the same conference. Sometimes the work we did was related, so we both cited each other's paper which was also under review at the same venue. (These were flavor citations in the "related work" section for completeness, not material to our arguments.) In the review copy, the reference lists the other paper as written by "anonymous (also under review at XXXX2025)," also emphasized by a footnote to explain the situation to reviewers. When it came time to submit the camera-ready copy, we either removed the anonymization or replaced it with an arxiv link if the other team's paper got rejected. :-) I doubt this practice improved either paper's chances of getting accepted.

Are these the sorts of citation rings you're talking about? If authors misrepresented the work as if it were accepted, or pretended it was published last year or something, I'd agree with you, but it's not too uncommon in my area for well-connected authors to cite manuscripts in process. I don't think it's a problem as long as they don't lean on them.

	▲	jacquesm 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, I'm talking about the ones where the citation itself is almost or even completely irrelevant and used as a way to inflate the citation count of the authors. You could find those by checking whether or not the value as a reference (ie: contributes to the understanding of the paper you are reading) is exceeded by the value of the linkage itself.
	▲	zipy124 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The flavour citations in related work is the best place to launder citations.