Nearly 3,000 peer-reviewed medical papers have fake citations, a Columbia Nursing AI-assisted audit finds; Columbia, May 8, 2026

Columbia ; Nearly 3,000 peer-reviewed medical papers have fake citations, a Columbia Nursing AI-assisted audit finds

"A new Columbia University School of Nursing AI-assisted audit reveals nearly 3,000 peer-reviewed medical papers have fake citations that do not exist in scientific databases. The results highlight an alarming trend in academic publishing as the use of AI grows.  The peer-reviewed research letter, “Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers, was published in The Lancet on May 7, 2026."

(link is external and opens in a new window)” was published in The Lancet on May 7, 2026

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers; The Lancet, May 9, 2026

Maxim Topaz,  Nir Roguin,  Pallavi Gupta,  Zhihong Zhang,  Laura-Maria Peltonen, The Lancet ; Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

"Scientific literature depends on the integrity of its references. Each reference implicitly asserts that a verifiable source exists and supports the claims being made. When references point to non-existent studies, readers, reviewers, and policy makers are unable to evaluate the evidence.

Fabricated references (references whose claimed titles correspond to no existing publication) can arise from paper mill activity, intentional misconduct, or uncritical use of artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools.1 Large language models (LLMs) generate plausible sounding but fictitious references, a well documented failure mode; previous studies estimate that 30–69% of LLM-generated references in biomedical contexts are fabricated.2,3 These references are often correctly formatted, attributed to real researchers, and bear plausible publication dates, making them difficult to detect by conventional peer review.4 To our knowledge, no systematic audit of reference integrity across the biomedical literature has been conducted until now.

We present findings from a reference-integrity audit of 2·5 million biomedical papers spanning 3 years, showing that fabricated references are embedded in the peer-reviewed literature at scale, and that the rate of fabrication is accelerating."

The case of the fake references in an ethics journal; Retraction Watch, December 2, 2025

Retraction Watch ; The case of the fake references in an ethics journal

"Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing.

The paper, published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics, explored “the whistleblowing experiences of individuals with disabilities in Ethiopian public educational institutions.” 

Erja Moore, an independent researcher based in Finland, came across the article while looking into a whistleblowing case in that country. “I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”...

The Journal of Academic Ethics is published by Springer Nature. Eleven of the fabricated references cite papers in the Journal of Business Ethics — another Springer Nature title.

“On one hand this is hilarious that an ethics journal publishes this, but on the other hand it seems that this is a much bigger problem in publishing and we can’t really trust scientific articles any more,” Moore said."