Audit Reveals AI-Fabricated Citations in Biomedical Papers, Raising Concerns Over Research Integrity
A recent audit conducted by Maxim Topaz and colleagues, as reported in The Lancet, has uncovered a significant issue of AI-fabricated citations within biomedical papers. The audit examined 2.5 million papers in PubMed Central Open Access from January 2023 to February 2026. The findings revealed that out of 97.1 million verified references, 4,046 were fabricated, affecting 2,810 papers. This represents a dramatic increase in fabrication rates, from approximately 4 per 10,000 papers in 2023 to about 57 per 10,000 by early 2026. The audit employed a multi-stage pipeline to identify suspect references, utilizing bibliographic records from PubMed, Crossref, OpenAlex, and Google Scholar, followed by an LLM-assisted review to distinguish between honest errors and fabrications. The use of AI writing tools, such as Claude 3.5 Haiku, was noted as a contributing factor to the rise in fabricated references. 
