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AI-generated citations found in thousands of biomedical papers

By PulseAugur Editorial · [2 sources] ·

A recent study published in The Lancet revealed a significant increase in AI-fabricated citations within biomedical journal articles. Researchers developed an AI-powered system to analyze over 2.4 million papers, identifying more than 4,000 fabricated references across 2,800 articles between 2023 and early 2026. This trend, particularly prevalent in review articles and potentially linked to LLM hallucinations, saw a more than 12-fold increase in fabricated citations per paper during the study period. AI

IMPACT Highlights the risks of LLM hallucinations in academic publishing and the need for AI-driven verification tools.

RANK_REASON The cluster discusses a research paper and its findings on AI-generated content, fitting the research bucket.

Read on Forbes — Innovation →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 2 sources. How we write summaries →

AI-generated citations found in thousands of biomedical papers

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109 days old
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COVERAGE [2]

  1. Forbes — Innovation TIER_1 English(EN) · Bruce Y. Lee, Senior Contributor ·

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

    A Lancet correspondence described how over a three-year period, 4,046 references in 2,810 published scientific journal articles had been fabricated, presumably by AI.

  2. dev.to — LLM tag TIER_1 English(EN) · Stefan Petschinka ·

    Introducing the AI Citation Readiness Framework

    <p><em>Most organizations are invisible to AI systems — not because they lack expertise, but because their entity signals are incomplete, inconsistent or unverifiable.</em></p> <p>AI systems do not rank websites. They construct answers from entities they can understand, verify an…

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