Limitation or failure · Medicine · General science
Lancet audit finds fabricated citations rising in biomedical papers
A biomedical-literature audit measuring fabricated references across PubMed Central papers from 2023 to early 2026.
Summary
Retraction Watch covered a Lancet audit of biomedical references that found fabricated citations rose sharply from 2023 to early 2026. The study audited PubMed Central papers, verified tens of millions of references, and reported that most affected articles had not yet received publisher action at the time of the audit.
AI role
AI writing tools are cited as a plausible contributor to fabricated references, while the audit used automated checks to distinguish fabricated citations from formatting errors.
Narrative role
This adds a medicine-specific downstream measurement of how AI-adjacent writing failures can contaminate the scientific record after publication, strengthening the tracker’s caution evidence beyond preprint repositories.
Caveat
The audit cannot prove AI caused every fabricated citation, and it focused on PubMed Central open-access records with references that could be verified through indexed identifiers.