Teaching Medical Students to Verify AI-Generated Citation Hallucinations
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.
Enrolled as an MBBS student in Year 3, Year 4, or Year 5 at Quaid-e-Azam Medical... [+4]
Previous participation in development, cognitive interviewing, piloting, or vali... [+2]