Gyeonghun Sun

Author directory

2026

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific writing, yet their citation behavior remains poorly understood. We introduce CiteSpectrum, a controlled dataset for analyzing citations across five levels of AI involvement, from LLM-Only generation to Human-Authored papers. Using citation-behavior features across fidelity, usage, and topology, we show that AI-generated papers differ from human-written papers in how citations are validated, grounded, used, and structurally organized. Even when retrieval and human guidance reduce ghost citations, AI-generated papers contain more unsupported claims, rely on front-section evidence, use citations more affirmatively, and form broader but less interconnected reference networks. Moreover, citation behavior alone enables a lightweight classifier to outperform strong text-based detectors, achieving 0.880 balanced accuracy and 0.944 AUROC. These results suggest that citation behavior provides a strong, interpretable signal of AI involvement beyond conventional textual patterns. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/DISL-Lab/CiteSpectrum-EMNLP26.