An audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers by Columbia University and other institutions shows that the rate of fabricated references has increased more than twelvefold since 2023. The researchers suspect a link to the widespread use of language models - the fake references match their paper's topic, follow correct formatting, and are nearly impossible to spot. 98 percent of the affected papers have received no response from their publishers.

A surge in AI-generated hallucinated citations has infiltrated scientific literature, with over 146,000 fabricated references appearing in 2025 alone. Studies reveal these fake…

An audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers by Columbia University and other institutions shows that the rate of fabricated references has increased more than twelvefold since 2023.…