Fed up with AI inventing fake paper DOIs, one researcher built a fix
AI chatbots often confidently cite research papers that don't actually exist, making up fake DOIs on the spot. A researcher got fed up and built a tool that checks whether a paper is real before returning it. Anyone using AI for research or study will find this useful.
When you ask an AI about research topics, it frequently cites papers with convincing-looking DOIs — but those DOIs often lead nowhere because the papers were simply invented. This is called 'hallucination,' and it's a serious problem for researchers who rely on accurate citations. Trusting a fake citation and including it in a report or paper can seriously damage credibility.
The developer built a 'skill' — a plug-in module for AI tools — that automatically checks each DOI against a real academic database before showing it to the user. Any paper that fails validation is filtered out, so only genuinely existing papers appear in the results. This kind of verification step is exactly what's missing when using AI as a research assistant.
Key points
- AI frequently invents DOIs for papers that do not exist
- This tool extracts DOIs from AI responses and checks them against a real academic database
- Only papers that pass the check are shown to the user
- If you use AI for research, always verify citations through a separate source
- Verification tools like this can be built and shared as AI skills or plugins
Quick term guide
- AI chatbots
- Software you can talk to that uses AI to answer or help with tasks.
- AI chatbot
- A computer program that replies in a chat like a person.
- hallucination
- When AI makes something up and presents it as a real answer.
- AI tools
- Software that can help create text, code, images, or other work.
- database
- A large collection of organized data used for search and analysis.
- validation
- Checking whether real people understand, want, or would use an idea before spending more time on it.
- responses
- An OpenAI API feature for creating and handling model answers.
- plugins
- Small add-ons that give the tool extra abilities.