Nobody checks citations. We checked all of them.
A full-corpus citation integrity audit of ACL 2026: all 209,985 references checked for existence, and claim citations verified against the cited papers themselves.
209,985references audited across 4,459 papers
2confirmed nonexistent references. Fabrication is not the story
16%of papers carry at least one confirmed unsupported citation
13%our own first-pass precision, published, not hidden
Existence is a solved problem
Two verification stages plus human review reduced 210k references to 12 leads and 2 confirmed fabrications: 0.001%. The scare narrative ends there.
Support is the real problem
Real papers, cited for claims they never make. One in six papers carries at least one confirmed case, and existence checks can never catch them.
False positives are the enemy
Raw detector output would have overstated the problem 8x. Every number we publish survived a refutation-stance second stage, and our error rates ship with the code.