AI-hallucinated citations are creeping into papers that shape clinical guidelines, researchers warn
An audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers by Columbia University and other institutions shows that the rate of fabricated references has increased more than twelvefold since 2023. The researchers suspect a link to the widespread use of language models - the fake references match their paper's topic, follow correct formatting, and are nearly impossible to spot. 98 percent of the affected papers have received no response from their publishers.
Article intelligence
Key points
- Audit of 2.5M biomedical papers shows fabricated reference rate up >12x since 2023
- Fake references match topics, formatting; nearly undetectable
- 98% of affected papers got no publisher response
Why it matters
This matters because audit of 2.5M biomedical papers shows fabricated reference rate up >12x since 2023.
Technical impact
May affect model selection, inference cost, product capability, and evaluation benchmarks.
An audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers by Columbia University and other institutions shows that the rate of fabricated references has increased more than twelvefold since 2023. The researchers suspect a link to the widespread use of language models - the fake references match their paper's topic, follow correct formatting, and are nearly impossible to spot. 98 percent of the affected papers have received no response from their publishers.
The article AI-hallucinated citations are creeping into papers that shape clinical guidelines, researchers warn appeared first on The Decoder.