Figured out how to get AI to stop making up fake citations in my research drafts

I was struggling with ChatGPT making up sources that looked real but didn't exist. Tried telling it to only use verified links but that didn't help much. Then I started feeding it the actual PDFs of 3 specific papers I wanted referenced and asking it to pull quotes from those only. After about 6 tries with different prompts I got a clean draft with real citations. Now I just upload my source files first before asking for any research help. Has anyone else found a better way to handle the hallucination problem with academic writing?

2 comments

2 Comments

wesleyjohnson7d ago

My buddy Dave was writing his thesis on urban development and kept catching ChatGPT citing a paper from "Journal of City Planning" that just didn't exist. He spent like two hours trying to find it through the university library before he realized it was totally made up. He started doing the same thing you are now, uploading his own PDFs and even adding page numbers in parentheses for the AI to reference. Said it cut his revision time in half once he got the hang of it.

ellis.charles6d ago

Gotta push back a little on that, @wesleyjohnson - my experience with page numbers has been hit or miss, not a sure thing.