Case studies
The cases below rest on a filing, a court order, a retraction notice, or an editor's correction that is already public. We ran the original document through Merlise and kept the ledger it produced, sources included, so you can check it against the record yourself.
Legal
Citations checked against the reporter, the opinion, and the docket.
Two dozen citations, and the court had already counted them
A federal appeals court catalogued the fake and misused citations in a set of briefs. We ran the same brief and reached the same appendix.
June 2026 · 5 minThe case was real. The quote inside it was not.
A Ninth Circuit sanctions order found real cases carrying invented quotations. That failure survives a check that only confirms a citation exists.
February 2026 · 5 minA source that reads like a real one and is not
Fabricated citations are no longer rare or confined to one firm. A tracked database now counts several new ones a day.
March 2026 · 4 minThe case exists. It just does not say that.
The hardest citation to catch is the one that resolves cleanly and still fails, because the source is real and the claim attached to it is not.
March 2026 · 4 minFinancial
Filings read against themselves and against what came after them.
Ten days after filing, a fifth of the revenue disappeared
NeuroOne filed a 10-Q reporting 2.4 million in quarterly revenue. Ten days later, the company said half a million of it was not real.
May 2026 · 4 minOne filing undid eighteen months of statements
Richtech Robotics told investors that five separate filings, going back a year and a half, could no longer be relied upon.
June 2026 · 5 minThe sentence said improved. The filing did not agree.
Prose summaries of financial results drift from the filings behind them more often than most readers expect, and the drift is rarely a typo.
May 2026 · 4 minA number can be true on Monday and wrong by Friday
Public filings change underneath the content written about them. Nothing about the original article knows when that happens unless something checks.
June 2026 · 4 minScientific
References checked against the paper they claim to point to.
Five reviewers read the paper. None of them opened this reference.
An independent analysis of NeurIPS 2025 found over a hundred fabricated citations across accepted papers, despite one of the field's more selective review processes.
January 2026 · 5 minThe paper is real. It was also withdrawn sixteen years ago.
A citation can resolve perfectly and still be unsafe to rely on, when the source it points to has been formally retracted.
April 2026 · 4 minOne in 458 papers now cites a source that does not exist
Three separate investigations, in different venues, converged on the same trend line without comparing notes.
May 2026 · 4 minThe result was modest. The abstract was not.
No citation is missing and no number is wrong. The failure is that the language claims more certainty than the underlying study supports.
June 2026 · 5 minEditorial
Quotes and contributors checked against a primary record.
An article about an AI behaving badly was written by one
Ars Technica retracted a story about an AI coding agent after the quotations it attributed to a named engineer turned out to be invented.
February 2026 · 4 minThe byline was invented before the story was
WIRED retracted a freelance article after determining that both the story and the contributor behind it could not be verified.
2026 · 4 minQuotation marks are a promise. This one had nothing behind it.
A direct quote claims exactness in a way a paraphrase never does, which is exactly why it deserves its own kind of check.
2026 · 4 minThe claim had already been checked. It came back anyway.
A false health claim can be debunked, go quiet, and resurface in slightly different words through a new social cycle, as if nobody had ever looked at it.
2026 · 4 minBring one of your own.
We will run a real document from your desk through Merlise and walk you through the ledger, claim by claim.