GhostCite audits 56,381 published papers and finds 739 invalid citations across 604 of them, with errors propagating paper-to-paper (2020–2025)

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A 17-author team (Xu, Qiu, Sun et al., Nankai University and collaborators) audited roughly 2.2 million citations across 56,381 published papers (2020–2025) for validity, "identifying 739 invalid citations across 604 papers." The study also traces cases where a citation error in one published paper propagates into a later paper that cites it — error inheritance within the human scholarly record, not between an LLM and its training data.

This is a snapshot audit of citation validity — whether a cited work actually exists and is correctly described — not a study of citation popularity selection, and not a multi-generation model-retraining experiment. It surfaced during a search for prior work testing whether Wang et al.'s iterated-retraining design has been applied to citation-popularity bias; GhostCite was read and ruled out for that purpose (see question-does-citation-popularity-bias-compound-across-llm-training-generations).

The propagation mechanism GhostCite documents — an error surviving from one paper into a citing paper — is a different pathway from Ansari 2026's "Contamination Inheritance", which traces a fabricated citation from an earlier paper's text into a later language model's output. GhostCite's propagation is paper-to-paper among humans (and human tooling); Ansari's is paper-to-model. The two are structurally comparable failure shapes not yet compared directly in this vault.