Evaluation of Large Language Model Performance and Reliability for Citations and References in Scholarly Writing: Cross-Disciplinary Study

Background Large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Objective The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of citations and references generated by ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) in two distinct academic domains: the natural sciences and humanities. Methods Two researchers independently prompted ChatGPT to write an introduction section for a manuscript and include citations; they then evaluated the accuracy of the citations and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Results were compared between the two disciplines. Results Ten topics were included, including 5 in the natural sciences and 5 in the humanities. A total of 102 citations were generated, with 55 in the natural sciences and 47 in the humanities. Among these, 40 citations (72.7%) in the natural sciences and 36 citations (76.6%) in the humanities were confirmed to exist (P=.42). There were significant disparities found in DOI presence in the natural sciences (39/55, 70.9%) and the humanities (18/47, 38.3%), along with significant differences in accuracy between the two disciplines (18/55, 32.7% vs 4/47, 8.5%). DOI hallucination was more prevalent in the humanities (42/55, 89.4%). The Levenshtein distance was significantly higher in the humanities than in the natural sciences, reflecting the lower DOI accuracy. Conclusions ChatGPT’s performance in generating citations and references varies across disciplines. Differences in DOI standards and disciplinary nuances contribute to performance variations. Researchers should consider the strengths and limitations of artificial intelligence writing tools with respect to citation accuracy. The use of domain-specific models may enhance accuracy.