A large audit of biomedical literature found a growing number of fabricated references appearing in peer-reviewed medical papers, raising concerns about evidence integrity in scientific publishing. Researchers identified more than 4,000 fabricated citations across 2,810 papers after screening nearly 2.5 million open-access biomedical articles indexed in PubMed Central between 2023 and early 2026. Fabricated references often appeared highly plausible and were difficult to detect during routine peer review. The authors noted that large language models may contribute to the trend, although causation was not established. Most affected papers had not received publisher corrections or retractions at the time of analysis.

Source: The Lancet