Generative AI tools (such as chatGPT, Gemini AI Microsoft Copilot Perplexity AI) are very good at summarizing and highlighting the content of published papers and may suggest how important a source is to a field of study, particularly for a highly cited paper.
But, using generative AI for citation searching is not recommended as a first stop if you are not an expert because, sometimes, the programs will make up citations in order to complete a response (called hallucinations) and these can be hard to spot if you are not very familiar with sources.
If you have a citation you suspect is a hallucination, searching the title in Google Scholar by title and by author with likely main keywords and alternative spellings should reveal if there is anything like the citation you have from generative AI. Not getting any results after trying different combinations is a pretty good sign an actual source does not exist.
