From Topaz et al. (2026) Paper In The Lancet 2.5 Reviewing citations in peer-reviewed papers in PubMed:
Of the 97·1 million verified references, we identified 4046 fabricated references in 2810 papers (illustrative examples are shown in Appendix P5–6). In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had increased to one in 458 and in the first 7 weeks of 2026, one in 277 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. The creation rate increased more than 12-fold, from about four per 10,000 papers in 2023, to 51·3 per 10,000 papers in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 56·9 per 10,000 papers in early 2026.
You can read the full paper here.
