Robot Librarians Invented 4,046 Sources, and Some Ended Up in Clinical Guidelines
Ourtake
Fake citations are now load-bearing in medicine, and the guidelines built on them are not checking their footnotes.
What happened
A study of 97.1 million references found 4,046 fabricated ones across 2,810 papers, with the rate rising more than twelve-fold from 2023 to early 2026. The authors suspect language model use, though they also cite paper mills and indexing changes; 98.4 percent of affected papers had received no publisher response.