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Teaching Medical Students to Verify AI-Generated Citation Hallucinations
Sponsor: Quaid-e-Azam Medical College
Summary
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools are increasingly used by medical students for literature searching, scientific writing, and research. However, AI-generated citations may contain errors. Some references may not exist or may contain incorrect bibliographic details, while other references may be genuine but may not actually support the claim for which they are cited. This randomized educational study will evaluate whether a structured citation-verification framework called SARA can improve medical students' ability to identify and correct these problems. SARA teaches students to assess four elements of a citation: Source authenticity, Accuracy, Relevance, and Alignment between the cited evidence and the claim being made. Year 3-5 medical students will be randomly assigned to either a 75-minute SARA training session or an attention-matched session on responsible use of GenAI in academic work. Participants will complete citation-verification assessments before training, immediately after training, and 12 weeks later. The main outcome will assess whether students can independently apply the verification approach to an unstructured literature-review task 12 weeks after training, without being prompted to use SARA. The study will also examine which types of citation errors remain difficult, whether students initiate appropriate verification, the quality of their verification, handling of valid citations, and confidence in their judgments. A subgroup of participants will take part in think-aloud and follow-up interviews to explore how they approach citation verification and transfer the strategy to new tasks.
Official title: Effect of the SARA Citation-Verification Framework on Medical Students' Verification of AI-Generated Citation Hallucinations: A Randomized Controlled Trial With an Explanatory Sequential Mixed-Methods Component
Key Details
Gender
All
Age Range
Any - Any
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Enrollment
320
Start Date
2026-09-26
Completion Date
2027-02-01
Last Updated
2026-09-28
Healthy Volunteers
Yes
Interventions
SARA Citation-Verification Training
A standardized 75-minute educational intervention using the SARA framework: Source authenticity, Accuracy, Relevance, and Alignment. The session includes facilitator modelling and think-aloud demonstration, coached practice with feedback, a one-page verification scaffold, learner articulation and reflection, and progressive fading of prompts before independent practice. The intervention is designed to teach medical students to identify both source-level citation errors and deeper evidence-claim errors and to apply verification independently.
Responsible GenAI Education Intervention Description
A standardized 75-minute attention-matched educational session on responsible use of generative artificial intelligence in academic work. The session covers privacy, disclosure, authorship, academic integrity, and general awareness that GenAI may produce errors. It does not teach the SARA framework or another structured citation-verification process. The session is matched to the SARA intervention for duration, group size, facilitator interaction, and delivery format.