iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I typically review all of the hallucinations in articles I post for "Hallucination of the day". But this article has over 50, and I gave up after the first 10. veruscite.com/share/20GoGI... This is obviously a dereliction of any duty to ensure quality via a peer reviewed journal editorial process.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Council on CJ released their expert panel on the causes of the US homicide decline. I was one of the participants. counciloncj.org/whats-drivin... Not much agreement on what caused the decline, but more on several factors the group was confident did not cause the decline.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It is also a case where a paper made its own Google Scholar entries for these papers that do not exist.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

First user contribution to the hall of hallucinations. Sign up, add a few of your own veruscite.com/hallucinations

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

VerusCite has its first retraction veruscite.com/blog/verusci...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

New VerusCite blog post, some editors/authors have given pushback on what I flag as an AI hallucination. Often these are articles that exist, but have whole-cloth fabricated elements, like made up authors or a totally wrong periodical. veruscite.com/blog/what-is...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Hallucination of the day in Probation Journal Made the tool easy to go and manually review, so I changed a minor error and not found in this paper on checking more closely. veruscite.com/share/Zi1no1...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Hallucination of the day in a Philosophy journal -- "generating metacognitive feelings of confidence that are easily mistaken for epistemic justification" -- seems like an apt quote veruscite.com/share/98TNXr...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Another 4 hallucinations added to the hall today. Sign up, add a few of your own, veruscite.com/hallucinations

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I have created an app to conduct on-demand synthetic control analysis for crime trends at the city level (using Jeff Asher's RTCI data). Check it out at apwheele.github.io/SynthRTCI/

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I have not been the one submitting a paper for years now, can someone confirm that the DOI's are inserted by Springer copyeditors? (Not authors?) So when they cannot find the right DOI they just insert the next best guess (which indeed is not the correct paper). veruscite.com/share/8NKB24...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Hallucination of the day in BMC Geriatrics This journal charges over $3000 for article processing fees. My tool is $2. They could raise APCs by less than 0.1% to cover my tool. veruscite.com/share/ujEErd...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Some updates to the Crime Decomposition explorer. Included series for violent and property crimes, a sub-panel so it is easier to see trends across each crime type, and a toggle to index those graphs so global and local start at the same line. This is Scranton, apwheele.github.io/CrimeDecomp/...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Some trends in Pittsburgh crimes are going up: MV Theft, Rape, and Thefts apwheele.github.io/CrimeDecomp/... Data from the real-time-crime-index

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Hallucination of the day, an editorial in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology veruscite.com/share/SofefM... Hall of hallucinations is up to 45 papers and growing, contribute some examples!

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

New VerusCite blog post, Springer AI reference checks are not working veruscite.com/blog/springe... Despite Springer putting out a press release a year ago, this post has clear examples where their internal tool is obviously lacking. Academics should demand more rigor from peer reviewed pubs.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Hallucination of the day in Crime & Delinquency. A tell for current heavy AI use in articles is odd citations. Why would a criminology article cite a nursing article on how to conduct content analysis? veruscite.com/share/Er_8Pb...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Hallucination of the day. It is hard to know if the entire results are just fabricated as well. So did they actually do the experiment? Or just have AI make up the whole paper? The figures in this paper are clearly AI generated as well. veruscite.com/share/4LrRd8...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Hallucination of the day is a bit meta -- an article about using Knowledge graphs to prevent hallucinations in LLMs. It is another example of Google Scholar indexing a fake paper. The authors created this fake paper in a paper in 2025, and it persisted to their more recent 2026 paper.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

In another one of this fellow's paper, he cites an article about pets and Hurricane Katrina. The rub is the article does not exist, and even if it did, was published in 2001. veruscite.com/share/PlEeuA...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Hallucination of the day comes from researchers at Microsoft. My tool classifies hallucinations as information that directly conflicts with the known ground truth. If you just make up papers entirely though, it will say not found. veruscite.com/share/N4OWim...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Hallucination of the day, another set of totally made up authors after the first author listed is correct. veruscite.com/share/4nN-gR... Citations being wrong does not mean the paper is wrong, but probably signals other folks should take a closer look.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I know many editors are concerned about privacy and submitting articles to LLMs. I understand these concerns, and built several safeguards into VerusCite from the start to handle this: ZDR, I only upload the references, and I do not retain the PDF. veruscite.com/blog/how-ver...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Hallucination of the day, an article in Scientometrics that suggests AI and human based reviews of novelty in proposals substantially differs. Citation in question has just a bunch of made up authors on a paper. veruscite.com/share/yyPIEi...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Hallucination of the day, a systematic review with over 380 citations, my tool flagged 16 as suspicious (mostly author lists that are totally wrong). veruscite.com/share/OO2mdf...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Hallucination of the day from Artificial Intelligence Review, just totally wrong authors on over a dozen papers. LLM as a judge did not quite catch the errors in the LLM as a judge review paper. veruscite.com/share/OotE2M...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Cleaning up some issues with the crim consortium pages this morning. Check it out at, crimconsortium.com, jobs board, checklist for open criminology scholarship, open source pages for different members (mentor match still needs to get the certificate for https). Join as a member!

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Project of the week attempting to use up my leftover codex credits, optimal search paths given a probability surface. github.com/apwheele/opt... Spent a week on this in 2020 and was unable to generate any useable model. Codex did it in less than 3 hours (and with only 16% of weekly budget).

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

British Journal of Criminology is up to 3 papers in the Hall of Hallucinations veruscite.com/hallucinatio... Sign up, add some more.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Some recent additions to the hall of hallucinations. Journals include British Journal of Crim article (2nd example), Trends in Organized Crime, Crime Media & Culture, and Policing & Society. AI hallucinations are not just a problem in Computer Science! veruscite.com/hallucinations

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Hallucination of the day is a citation for a Covid and crime paper published in 2019. veruscite.com/share/J8aveL... $2 a review, and if you are an editor it is worth it to save publishing embarrassing errors like this.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Guys, this paper from DeepMind has multiple hallucinated references veruscite-data.com/share/-7KyAg...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Assaults in Atlanta are bucking the national trend. Other index crimes are mostly aligned with national trends though. Can see at apwheele.github.io/CrimeDecomp/... Data via the Real-Time-Crime-Index

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I know a decent number of Brits follow me here on BlueSky. Hallucination of the day is from the British Journal of Crim, Can view the report at veruscite-data.com/share/fbJoJ_... $2 to review a paper. Given OA chargers are over £4000, seems like a good deal to me.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

What is going on with Thefts in Vallejo, CA? apwheele.github.io/CrimeDecomp/...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Recent quote for NOTUS on some of the recent crime decline back and forth. Overall crime has been declining since the uptick around Covid/Floyd. www.notus.org/trump-white-...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

New blog post, License Plate Reader Searches should require a warrant. I go over recent case law (including work I did with Institute for Justice in their Norfolk case). And how I think auditing should be done for reviewing real time searches. andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/l...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

FYI for professors, if using any of my books for classes I am happy to give a coupon. Typically sell epub for $10 and paperback for $30 or $40. (These same through a publisher would be $100 to $200.) crimede-coder.com/cdcstore/pro...

Screenshot of books available for purchase from Crime De-Coder. Into to python and LLMs for mortals.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

What I had Codex working on the past few days, some STL type decompositions of US crime data (courtesy of @jeffasher.bsky.social RTCI). Can see paper and R code at github.com/apwheele/Cri... A few graphs to whet your appetite.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I have published an external benchmark/methodology at github.com/apwheele/ver... I have intentionally created a difficult benchmark -- I have tried very hard to limit false positives (at the expense of limiting recall), but overall the FP rates are under 1% in the benchmarks.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

The cost is currently $2 per review, and you get 2 free reviews on signup. I do not request a monthly subscription nor have a complicated credit system. Editors at most journals, to handle your yearly volume should be under $1000 per year.

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Hallucinations in peer review research are a current major problem. It signals a grave lack of care by researchers, and should trigger more scrutiny of the claims therein. VerusCite is a tool to extract and verify citations in academic articles. Try it out at veruscite-data.com

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

A UK think tank on the responsible use of AI in policing just put out a paper that has hallucinated references. See the citation report at veruscite-data.com/share/mTAk46...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

It is better to follow me for more updates at www.linkedin.com/company/crim... than here. But for a random tidbit, here is one of my favorite maps in my career. Proportion differences in pedestrian stops vs violent crime in NYC.

Proportion differences for pedestrian stops vs violent crime in NYC

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I have an R WASM app up on my website. For experiments where you count things (e.g. reduce crime over time, increase arrest rates), this shows how long you need to evaluate to get a precise treatment effect estimate. crimede-coder.com/graphs/Plann...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

New blog post, policing scholars should join the American Society of Evidence Based Policing, it is a much better org for collaborating with police than either ASC/ACJS. Renee Mitchell is the modern day Vollmer. crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20...

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

I go over a few errors (quite minor, but one clear citation hallucination!), any why learning python coding with these tools is likely going to be *more important* in the future (as it provides feedback for the tools)

Weekly chart with error bars for BMVs in Chapel Hill

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

New blog post, I show an example session of using the Gemini CLI to conduct crime analysis. Car breakins in Chapel Hill using public data. The current agent coding tools (not just Claude Code, also Codex and Gemini) are very good. crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20...

Folium map of car break ins in Chapel Hill

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Interview with Jason Elder on the LEA Podcast is out about my recent book www.leapodcasts.com/e/llms-for/ Check it out, and has the first promo code for the paperback version of the book

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Andy Wheeler @crimede-coder.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

That is not correct - they are exchangeable for the vast majority of tasks. Here is the relevant passage where I state my premise -- goal I state here is to get students jobs. (Which I understand some professors do not agree with.)

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