The Case of the Mysterious Citations

TL;DR

This study investigates the rise of mysterious citations in high-performance computing conference papers, revealing their increasing prevalence, associated errors, and the inadequacy of current citation verification policies.

Contribution

Developed an automated pipeline to detect mysterious citations and analyzed their prevalence and errors in recent conference proceedings, highlighting policy shortcomings.

Findings

Mysterious citations appeared in all 2025 proceedings but none in 2021.

2-6% of papers in 2025 contained mysterious citations.

Sharp increase in title and authorship errors related to citations.

Abstract

Mysterious citations are routinely appearing in peer-reviewed publications throughout the scientific community. In this paper, we developed an automated pipeline and examine the proceedings of four major high-performance computing conferences, comparing the accuracy of citations between the 2021 and 2025 proceedings. While none of the 2021 papers contained mysterious citations, every 2025 proceeding did, impacting 2-6\% of published papers. In addition, we observe a sharp rise in paper title and authorship errors, motivating the need for stronger citation-verification practice. No author within our dataset acknowledged using AI to generate citations even though all four conference policies required it, indicating current policies are insufficient.