Topaz, M ∙ Roguin, N ∙ Gupta, P ∙ et
Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers
Report the first systematic evaluation of the authenticity of references. The authors initially identified 125 615 773 references from 2 471 758 papers drawn from PubMed Central’s Open Access platform published from Jan 1, 2023, to Feb 18, 2026. Of these references, only 77% (97·1 million) carried a PubMed ID and were further evaluated. References, after passing through several filters to account for spelling errors in names or incorrect titles, were then verified against PubMed, Crossref, OpenAlex, and Google Scholar. References not found in any of these four databases were considered fabricated. Of the 97·1 million references evaluated, 4046 from 2810 papers were considered fake. This number was shown to have increased with time, from one in 2828 papers in 2023, to one in 458 papers at the end of 2025.