In 2025, peer-reviewed journals published 147,000 citations to studies that don't exist !!
Researchers went through 2.5 million papers and found citations tied to non-existent studies, authors, and journals. AI made them up. Nobody caught the problem. Now they are sitting in the scientific record for good.
The scary part is not how many there are. It is how fast this is growing. In 2023, it was 1 in 2,828 papers. By early 2026, it is 1 in 277. That curve does not magically flatten.
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arxiv .org/pdf/2605.07723
