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Citing Less Critically: LLMs Reshape the Rhetoric and Reach of Scientific Citation

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 1, 2026 · UTC

Scientific citations carry rhetorical intent. Scholars may cite prior work positively (supporting), negatively (contrasting), or neutrally (mentioning). As large language models (LLMs) increasingly assist scientific writing, whether they reproduce citations with the same rhetorical intent as humans remains unclear. We introduce a masked-citation task to compare human and LLM-generated citation behavior. For each citation context, an LLM generates a replacement citation sentence, producing a counterfactual corpus directly comparable to human citation. We analyze what, whom, and how models cite,

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First collected: 2026-09-21T06:01:56.170Z. This is not the publication date.