{
  "name": "CiteMe citation verification outcomes — July 2026",
  "description": "Aggregate verification outcomes for every reference submitted to the CiteMe Reference Checker and Citation Checker in the 30 days ending 2026-07-08, counted from server-side verification logs. A reference carries a 'fabrication signature' when it is well-formed but its identifiers resolve to nothing and no acceptable title-author-year match exists in any connected scholarly database (OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, Europe PMC, and others). All figures are aggregates; no individual bibliography, reference, document, or user is identifiable.",
  "url": "https://citeme.app/learn/citation-hallucination-statistics",
  "publisher": "CiteMe (citeme.app)",
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "datePublished": "2026-07-09",
  "temporalCoverage": "2026-06-08/2026-07-08",
  "windowDays": 30,
  "totals": {
    "checks": 2149,
    "references": 47098,
    "medianReferencesPerCheck": 17
  },
  "outcomes": {
    "verified": { "references": 25370, "shareOfAllReferences": 0.539 },
    "partialMatch": { "references": 5736, "shareOfAllReferences": 0.122 },
    "unverified": { "references": 15992, "shareOfAllReferences": 0.34 }
  },
  "fabricationSignature": {
    "note": "Subset of unverified references with strong fabrication signals; deliberately conservative.",
    "references": 12803,
    "shareOfAllReferences": 0.272
  },
  "bibliographies": {
    "definition": "Checks containing 5 or more references.",
    "n": 1553,
    "shareWithAtLeastOneFlaggedFabricated": 0.844,
    "shareWithAtLeastOneUnverified": 0.905
  },
  "caveats": [
    "Selection bias: bibliographies submitted to a reference checker, not a random sample of academic writing.",
    "Unverified includes real works absent from the indexed databases; the flagged fabrication rate is a lower bound.",
    "Cells below the internal anonymization threshold are suppressed upstream and never reach this dataset."
  ]
}