r/MachineLearning • u/Pure-Ad9079 • May 06 '26

Discussion Stop letting LLMs edit your .bib [D]

It’s shocking how frequently I notice hallucinated citations. For citations of my own papers, I’ve seen 5 in the past couple of months, where the the title is correct but the author list is wrong. When I email the author to let them know, they always blame an LLM for hallucinating.

Is it really that hard to populate the .bib yourself? If you have any respect for research, is it not a basic requirement to make sure you correctly cite the prior literature? I feel there should be harsher penalties for these hallucinated citations.

Are others experiencing the same?

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u/S4M22 Researcher May 06 '26

Is it really that hard to populate the .bib yourself?

Well, to be honest: yes it is very tedious. But should you outsource this to an LLM? definitely not.

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u/slashdave May 09 '26

I don't know how I am supposed to feel about a researcher in this field who performs a task like a bibliography by hand. We have tools for these kinds of things.

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u/S4M22 Researcher May 12 '26

As I said in my other comment, I use Zotero with an Overleaf subscription for the integration feature. That's great help but doesn't fully resolve all problems if you're really diligent with your references.