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Artificial Intelligence Tools for Detection, Research and Writing

Generative AI Related Writing and Research Tools Co-Owned and Co-Curated by Brian Quinn and Erin Burns

Resources for Citing AI

What If I Can't Find the Citations?

I can’t find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?

ChatGPT and other AI tools sometimes make up citations that don't exist.

ChatGPT might give you articles by an author that usually writes about your topic, or even identify a journal that published on your topic, but the title, pages numbers, and dates are completely fictional. This is because ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, so has no way of identifying actual sources.

You can try to see if any are valid by searching in OneSearch on our home page or in Google Scholar, but chances are the sources do not exist.

It's better to use ChatGPT for tasks like these:

  • Brainstorming and getting creatively unstuck
  • Editing and constructive criticism of your writing
  • Explaining concepts at multiple difficulty levels
  • Summarizing long texts
  • other writing and text-related tasks.

It's not designed to be a search engine. Use OneSearch, library databases for your discipline, or Google Scholar instead.

(Adapted from University of Arizona Libraries website)