Avoid fake citations with source-grounded AI
Hallucinated references are plausible until you try to verify them.
Large language models can generate citations that look perfect—correct journal, realistic author list, convincing year—and still be wrong. Flowing does not eliminate human judgment, but it shifts AI output toward passages from PDFs you imported, so you verify claims against real text.
Key facts
- Fake citations (hallucinated references) are a known risk when AI writes without access to your actual sources.
- Flowing attaches library snippets to recall, Ask, polish, and continue-writing suggestions.
- Evidence cards let you open the cited passage in your imported PDF before accepting text.
- Your PDF library stays local; only attached context for a request is sent for AI processing.
- Human review remains essential—Flowing makes verification faster, not optional.
What “fake citation” means in practice
The failure mode is not always a completely invented paper. Sometimes the paper exists but the model misstates the finding, quotes a number that is not in the PDF, or blends two studies into one claim. Generic chat makes these errors easy because there is no built-in link between the sentence and a specific passage you can audit.
Researchers on forums often call these “ghost citations”—entries that look fine in the draft but collapse when you search your library or open the PDF.
How Flowing changes the verification loop
When you use keyword recall or Ask with context, Flowing works from passages in your imported library. Suggestions arrive as cards tied to those snippets. Before you accept a rewrite or a continuation, you can jump to the source text and confirm the claim matches what the authors actually wrote.
That loop—suggest, link, verify, accept—is slower than blind copy-paste from chat, but far faster than hunting down a hallucinated reference after your supervisor marks up the draft.
Good habits still matter
Source-grounded AI is not a substitute for your own reading. Import the papers you will rely on, attach the right context chips, and keep final bibliography management in the tool you trust (many researchers pair Flowing with Zotero).
Use Flowing when citations must survive scrutiny; use open chat when you are brainstorming without commitments to specific sources.