The reference integrity audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers spans 3 years of scientific publishing. Credit: Aramyan/Getty

An audit of 2.5 million academic papers has identified nearly 3,000 biomedical-science papers that contain fake references — ones that could not be traced to known publications.

The findings, published in The Lancet on 7 May 1 , are contained in the first academic study to estimate the scale of fake citations in the biomedical literature.

The authors designed an automated pipeline to screen papers from PubMed Central — a database of publicly accessible biomedical articles — published between January 2023 and February 2026.

Their work suggests that the contamination of papers with fake citations is a rapidly growing problem in biomedicine. There were 12 times more publications with fabricated citations in 2025 compared with 2023 (see 'Fabricated references on the rise').

Source: Ref.…