White House Health Report Included Fake Citations (Published 2025)

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

Scientific literature depends on the integrity of its references. Each reference implicitly asserts that a verifiable source exists and supports the claims being made. When references point to non-existent studies, readers, reviewers, and policy makers are unable to evaluate the evidence.

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

Scientific literature depends on the integrity of its references. Each reference implicitly asserts that a verifiable source exists and supports the claims being made. When references point to non-existent studies, readers, reviewers, and policy makers are unable to evaluate the evidence.

Fraudulent citations, blamed on AI hallucinations, are becoming more common in research papers

“Fabricated” citations that do not reference real academic papers are spreading in the literature, polluting the public record of science, a new study found

Fabricated Citations — CITADEL

4,046 fabricated citations in the biomedical literature. A more than 12× rise in three years. Verified across PubMed, Crossref, OpenAlex, Google Scholar.

Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

Gunnar Ridderström/Pexels As a hospital librarian, Jessica Waite is typically successful at tracking down elusive articles for clinicians at Royal Hallamshire Hospital in England. So when a colleag…

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?

Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?

Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?

Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

“Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science

For years, spurious journals have proliferated online, promising academic credibility in exchange for cash.

Housing Research Needs a Credibility Revolution

YIMBY papers receive a disproportionate share of citations

Itai Yanai on Twitter / X

Is the scientific paper a fraud? Peter Medawar (Nobel Prize winner) suggested that publications are overly structured and formal, giving only a sanitized version of the discovery without revealing the thought process that actually led to it. pic.twitter.com/E3ttRPzcfL— Itai Yanai (@ItaiYanai) October 27, 2024

Google AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice

Exclusive: Inaccurate information presented in summaries, Guardian investigation finds

Is the scientific paper still a fraud?

How we write scientific papers does not reflect how we do science. Their formal structure infers a pre-ordained linear process rather than reflecting the messy creativity of research. This matters in the AI age because it masks the human in the process.

AI linked to explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers

Analysis flags hundreds of studies that seem to follow a template, reporting correlations between complex health conditions and single variables based on publicly available data sets.