This should come as a surprise to nobody.

Okay, quick, let me plug this article into AI so I can better understand it.

Okay, got it. 😉

All jokes aside, researchers have just discovered that fabricated citations in peer-reviewed papers have nearly quadrupled since 2023.

QUADRUPLED!

Researchers at Columbia University scanned about 500,000 papers published between January 2023 and March 2026 covering physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, and computer science, and guess what they found...

One in every 435 papers from early 2026 contained at least one completely fabricated AI reference. That's up from one in every 1,600 back in 2023.

Read that again if you need to. More context from Study Finds:

Across the full study period, about 26 of every 10,000 physics papers contained at least one fabricated reference, compared with about 4 of every 10,000 chemistry papers. Materials science ranked second, followed by computer science and engineering. Chemistry's figure is likely an undercount because some chemistry journals are filed under a different category in the database.
Scaling those rates up to the roughly 7 million papers indexed in these fields over the same period suggests about 8,500 papers in the database carry at least one fabricated reference. Most had one or two. Of the 619 affected papers, 518 had exactly one. But 27 papers had five or more, and that small group accounted for more than a third of all the fabricated references found.

Yeesh!

So let's recap: Scientists make a claim, they back it up with a citation, that citation leads to a paper that never existed, and peer reviewers apparently just let it happen.