Audit of 2.5 Million Papers Finds Fabricated Citations Surged After Mid-2024
A Lancet audit of 2.47 million open-access biomedical papers found fabricated citations rose from about 4 to 57 per 10,000 after mid-2024, a more than twelvefold jump that tracks the spread of AI writing tools.
Audit of 2.5 Million Papers Finds Fabricated Citations Surged After Mid-2024 A Lancet audit of 2.47 million open-access biomedical papers found fabricated citations rose from about 4 to 57 per 10,000 after mid-2024, a more than twelvefold jump that tracks the spread of AI writing tools. Aaron Rafferty June 26, 2026 Key Takeaways A Lancet audit of 2.47 million open-access biomedical papers found 4,046 fabricated citations across 2,810 papers. Fabricated references rose from about 4 to 57 per 10,000 papers after mid-2024, a more than twelvefold jump that tracks AI writing-tool adoption. The authors stop short of blaming AI alone, also flagging paper mills and misconduct, and found 98.4 percent of affected papers saw no publisher action. An automated audit of nearly 2.5 million open-access biomedical papers found fabricated citations climbing sharply after mid-2024, according to a study published in The Lancet on May 7. — (@) Researchers led by Maxim Topaz at Columbia University screened 2,471,758 papers and more than 125 million references in PubMed Central from January 2023 to February 2026, and flagged 4,046 fabricated citations across 2,810 papers. The rate held near 4 fabricated references per 10,000 papers through 2023, then jumped more than twelvefold, reaching about 57 per 10,000 in early 2026. By the first weeks of this year, roughly 1 in 277 papers cited a source that did not exist, up from 1 in 2,828 in 2023, according to Retraction Watch . The sharp climb began in mid-2024, when papers written with help from large language models started appearing in the index. The timing lines up, but the authors do not pin it on AI alone. Fabricated references can come from paper mills, deliberate misconduct, or uncritical use of AI tools, and indexing changes could pla