Verified hallucinated references at SIGCSE TS increased from 3 in the 2025 proceedings to 17 in the 2026 proceedings, appearing in 2.3% of 2026 papers¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r2 · q2
Currency · no dated study recorded · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? In SIGCSE TS, verified hallucinated references rose from 3 (2025 proceedings) to 17 (2026 proceedings), with the 17 appearing across seven 2026 publications; 2.3% of 2026 proceedings papers contained at least one hallucinated reference. → Paul Denny 2027

Evidence¶

Paul Denny 2027¶

Paul Denny, Gweneth Barbre, Musa Blake, Yan Cathy Hua, Juho Leinonen, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, James Prather, and Brent N. Reeves. (2027). Testing Our Foundations: Citation Trends, Errors, and Emerging Hallucinations in the Computing Education Literature. SIGCSE-TS 2027. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16574 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2609.16574

q2 · i? · associational · r2

Venue-level comparison using SIGCSE TS because both 2025 and 2026 proceedings were present in the April 2026 ACM DL snapshot; Table 2 lists the per-volume and per-venue totals (30 references, 14 papers overall). The comparison shows verified hallucinations increased from 3 in 2025 to 17 in 2026.

"In SIGCSE TS, the number of verified hallucinated references increased from 3 in the 2025 proceedings to 17 in the 2026 proceedings."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Conservative manual verification identified 30 hallucinated references across 14 papers in 2025 and 2026 computing education venues — a broader claim this one bears on
• Publication volume and reference-list lengths in ACM computing education venues have grown over time, particularly since the mid-1990s — related
• Of 30 verified hallucinated references, 13 appeared entirely fabricated and 17 were hybrid references combining a real title with fabricated authorship or metadata — related
• Of 100 human-audited claims, 39 are fully verifiable, 55 partially verifiable, and 6 not verifiable, with main responses showing stronger provenance than follow-ups — related
• Co-occurrence of fabricated references with interview admissions grew from 3.1% to 15% of cases, reaching about 1 in 7 cases by 2025 — related
• The platform's out-of-scope audit protocol is designed to neutralize student distrust of AI error by rewarding verified hallucination reports — related