ChatGPT (and similar chatbots like Gemini) sometimes generate citations that do not exist. ChatGPT might give you articles by an author that usually writes about your topic, or even can identify a journal that published on your topic, but the title, page numbers, and dates can be completely fictional. This is because ChatGPT cannot access scholarly information behind paywalls. Even so, it has a lot of data to pull from in its large language model (LLM) that enables it to generate very convincing, yet baseless, citations.

To confirm whether they are valid, try searching for them by title, author or keyword on Steely Library’s homepage or in Google Scholar.

ChatGPT is a great tool, but keep in mind that it is better suited for tasks such as:

• Generating topic ideas and keywords to search
• Improving and receiving helpful feedback on your writing
• Clarifying ideas at different levels of complexity

Rather than use ChatGPT to find sources, we recommend using Steely Library, Google Scholar, or subject-specific databases from our Research Guides instead.