{"id":259889,"date":"2026-05-30T18:19:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T22:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/30\/ai-fabricated-citations-in-over-2800-biomedical-journal-articles\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T18:40:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T22:40:14","slug":"ai-fabricated-citations-in-over-2800-biomedical-journal-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/30\/ai-fabricated-citations-in-over-2800-biomedical-journal-articles\/","title":{"rendered":"AI-Fabricated Citations In Over 2,800 Biomedical Journal Articles"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI-Fabricated Citations In Over 2,800 Biomedical Journal Articles<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/brucelee\/2026\/05\/30\/ai-fabricated-citations-in-over-2800-biomedical-journal-articles\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-30 18:19:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.forbes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

A correspondence to The Lancet described how over a three-year period, 4,046 references in 2,810 published scientific journal articles had been completely fabricated, presumably hallucinations by AI. (Photo: Getty)<\/span><\/p>\n

getty<\/p>\n

The use of artificial intelligence or AI by researchers to write their scientific papers is far from A-OK right now. Just look at what a research team recently described a in a correspondence to The Lancet \u2014over a three-year period, 4,046 references in 2,810 published scientific journal articles had been completely fabricated. Most of these fabrications were presumably hallucinations by AI, which kind of makes you wonder what else in those papers may have been artificial as well. <\/p>\n

By 2026 Approximately One In 277 Papers Had Presumably AI-Fabricated Citations<\/h2>\n

To conduct the review of what might have been generated by AI, the research team from Columbia University (Maxim Topaza, Nir Roguinb, Pallavi Guptab and Zhihong Zhanga) and the University of Eastern Finland (Laura-Maria Peltonen) turned to, well, AI. They developed an automated reference verification system. That\u2019s because reviewing all 2,471,758 papers with 125,615,773 accompanying references from January 1, 2023, through February 18, 2026, that are in PubMed Central\u2019s Open Access would have taken quite a bit of time without some computational help. <\/p>\n

Comparing citations listed in the papers with actual bibliographic records helped identify and flag any discrepancies. The research team used even more AI\u2014a large language model known as Claude 3.5 Haiku from Anthropic\u2014to help go through everything that was flagged and separate the honest errors from the pure fabrications. Any reference that couldn\u2019t be found databases like PubMed, Crossref, OpenAlex and Google Scholar was considered not fab and instead fabricated. <\/p>\n

During the first year searched\u20142023\u2014approximately one in 2828 papers had at least one fabricated reference. In just two years\u2014in 2025\u2014 this had already jumped up to…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AI-Fabricated Citations In Over 2,800 Biomedical Journal Articles https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/brucelee\/2026\/05\/30\/ai-fabricated-citations-in-over-2800-biomedical-journal-articles\/ Publish Date: 2026-05-30 18:19:00 Source Domain:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":259890,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/imageio.forbes.com\/specials-images\/imageserve\/6a1b6116ee2d58e57bd691f7\/0x0.jpg?format=jpg&height=900&width=1600&fit=bounds","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20,18],"class_list":["post-259889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-large-language-model"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259889"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259891,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259889\/revisions\/259891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}