Bad news, if confirmed! How many of these fabricated references is due to ML & AI?
I don't believe that the large majority of research paper authors would resort to any such activities. If this assumption is correct, then AI generated fake citations could be an easy indicator of e.g. shoddy work.
Is it possible that paper authors also use more automated methods to generate references for their papers? If so, then this could explain some of the issues with references.
How good or reliable a resource is OpenAlex for this kind of research?
The quote below does not specifically say it was AI that generated these fabricated references.
"... In May of 2026, healthcare AI scientist Maxim Topaz and his team at Columbia University demonstrated the extent of this issue in biomedical research articles, showing that the rate of fabricated references increased from four per 10,000 papers in 2023 to 51.3 per 10,000 papers at the end of 2025.1 ...
Topaz and his team downloaded a sample of 500,000 studies across these five fields indexed between January of 2023 and March 31, 2026, from the scholarly catalog OpenAlex. After extracting the papers’ references, they compared the titles in the references with those that they identified via the included digital object identifier (DOI) link.
They used a large language model to help discriminate false positives that arose in their verification pipeline due to formatting differences. If the source at the DOI link did not match the reference in the paper, the team searched for the titles across seven sources, including scholarly databases and search engines. Those entries that did not return results were considered fabricated references. ...
While Topaz and his team did not claim that the trend was caused by new AI models since they did not investigate that, Topaz said that they suspect these models are involved because of the coinciding timelines. ..."
From the abstract (2):
"References to nonexistent studies are well documented in biomedical research, but evidence outside biomedicine is limited.
We analyzed a stratified random sample of 500,000 peer-reviewed journal papers in chemistry, physics, materials science, engineering, and computer science published from January 2023 through March 31, 2026, using OpenAlex, a large open index of scholarly works and citations.
Our automated pipeline classified 1,135 references across 619 papers as fabricated, with 85.8% precision on masked expert review; fabricated is an operational label for a claimed title that could not be located in any of seven bibliographic and open-web sources.
Affected-paper prevalence rose from 1 in 1,600 (6.3 per 10,000) in 2023 to 1 in 435 (23.0 per 10,000) in the first quarter of 2026, and full-period rates differed roughly sixfold across fields, from 25.6 per 10,000 papers in physics to 4.3 in chemistry. Most affected papers contained one or two fabricated references, but the 27 papers containing five or more accounted for more than a third of all fabricated references identified. Applying each field’s rate to the approximately 7 million OpenAlex papers indexed in these fields gives an estimated 8,500 papers carrying at least one fabricated reference. Routine automated reference verification at submission, together with retrospective screening of the published literature, can detect fabricated references before and after they enter the scientific record."
Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers (1, open access)
Evaluation of possibly fabricated references in 500,000 science, engineering, and computing papers (2, open access)
Credits: The Scientist News Alerts
Figure Quarterly rate of fabricated references per 10 000 papers in PubMed Central from January, 2023, to February, 2026
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