AI-Fabricated Citations In Over 2,800 Biomedical Journal Articles

InnovationHealthcareAI-Fabricated Citations In Over 2,800 Biomedical Journal ArticlesByBruce Y. Lee,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Bruce Y. Lee, M.D., MBA, covers health, medicine, wellness and scienceFollow AuthorMay 30, 2026, 06:19pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.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)gettyThe 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 —over 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. By 2026 Approximately One In 277 Papers Had Presumably AI-Fabricated CitationsTo 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’s 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’s Open Access would have taken quite a bit of time without some computational help. Comparing citations listed in the papers with actual bibliographic records helped identify and flag any discrepancies. The research team used even more AI—a large language model known as Claude 3.5 Haiku from Anthropic—to help go through everyth...