Mysterious citations are routinely appearing in peer-reviewed publications throughout the scientific community. In this paper, we developed an automated pipeline and examine the proceedings of four major high-performance computing conferences, comparing the accuracy of citations between the 2021 and 2025 proceedings. While none of the 2021 papers contained mysterious citations, every 2025 proceeding did, impacting 2-6\% of published papers. In addition, we observe a sharp rise in paper title and authorship errors, motivating the need for stronger citation-verification practice. No author within our dataset acknowledged using AI to generate citations even though all four conference policies required it, indicating current policies are insufficient.
@article{arxiv.2602.05867,
title = {The Case of the Mysterious Citations},
author = {Amanda Bienz and Carl Pearson and Simon Garcia de Gonzalo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05867},
year = {2026}
}