Thousands of scientific citations found referencing non-existent studies in 2025

In 2025, academic journals published approximately 147,000 citations referencing research that does not exist.

A review of 2.5 million papers revealed numerous citations attributed to fabricated studies, authors, and journals. These false references were generated by AI systems and subsequently included in the scientific literature without detection.

Research indicates the frequency of such fabricated citations is rapidly increasing. In 2023, the occurrence was approximately 1 in every 2,828 papers, but by earl