The role of artificial intelligence in academic citation: A study on lens, cataract, and anterior segment research.

Domain-specific artificial intelligence models, particularly DeepSeek, outperform general-purpose models in generating PubMed citations from ophthalmic literature.

However, all the evaluated models exhibited citation errors, underscoring the necessity of human verification.

artificial intelligence tools may enhance academic workflows as assistive systems but should not be used autonomously for reference generation in medical research.