AI-assisted audit finds nearly 3,000 peer-reviewed medical papers contain fake citations, with fabrication rate up 12-fold since 2023
Source: eurekalert.org ↗
A medical professional or clinical guideline developer has no way of knowing that the evidence they are relying on does not exist.
A Columbia University School of Nursing team scanned 2.5 million biomedical papers published between 2023 and early 2026, and found 4,046 fabricated citations across 2,810 papers — references that simply do not exist in scientific databases. The fabrication rate grew more than 12-fold over the study period, with the sharpest spike beginning in mid-2024, neatly coinciding with the mass adoption of AI writing tools. One paper audited had 18 out of 30 fake references.
The stakes here are not merely academic: medical professionals and clinical guideline developers rely on this literature to make treatment decisions, and some of those ghost citations are already being cited by other papers and appearing in systematic reviews that shape patient care. At the time of the audit, 98.4% of affected papers had received no publisher action. The researchers are calling for mandatory reference verification at submission, retroactive screening, and a dedicated tracking category for fake citations — tools that, notably, would also involve AI to catch what AI helped create.