{"id":13173,"date":"2026-05-09T00:08:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T00:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=13173"},"modified":"2026-05-09T00:08:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T00:08:33","slug":"the-rise-in-fabricated-citations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=13173","title":{"rendered":"The rise in fabricated citations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140-6736(26)00603-3\/fulltext\">Topaz et al. (2026)<\/a> paper in <em>The Lancet<\/em> reviewing citations across 2.5 peer-reviewed papers in PubMed: <\/p>\n<p>Among 97\u00b71 million verified references, we identified 4046 fabricated references across 2810 papers (illustrative examples are shown in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140-6736(26)00603-3\/fulltext#supplementary-material\">appendix p 5\u20136<\/a>). In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had risen to one in 458 and in the first 7 weeks of 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one fabricated reference. The fabrication rate increased more than 12 times, from approximately four per 10\u2008000 papers in 2023, to 51\u00b73 per 10\u2008000 papers in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 56\u00b79 per 10\u2008000 papers in early 2026 <\/p>\n<p>You can read the full paper <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140-6736(26)00603-3\/fulltext\">here<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From a Topaz et al. (2026) paper in The Lancet reviewing citations across 2.5 peer-reviewed papers in PubMed: Among 97\u00b71 million verified references, we identified 4046 fabricated references across 2810 papers (illustrative examples are shown in the appendix p 5\u20136). In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}