Retraction Watch

One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis

*Figure from correspondence to* The Lancet by Maxim Topaz and colleagues.

Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 million papers published as a letter to The Lancet today.

The analysis of articles indexed in PubMed found that about one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 referenced a paper that didn’t exist. That was a jump from 2025’s rate of one in 458 and 2023’s one in 2,828. The researchers, led by Maxim Topaz of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, used AI to “distinguish genuine fabrications from formatting discrepancies such as informally abbreviated titles.”

Topaz’s group located the sharpest increase in hallucinated references in mid-2024, which they note coincided with the rise of AI writing tools. The findings come as Nature reported last month that tens of thousands of publications from 2025 “might include invalid references generated by AI.” Retraction Watch has seen its fair share of reports of hallucinated citations generated by LLMs like ChatGPT.

Russian news outlets hailed a cancer breakthrough, but the retraction went unnoticed

In August 2021, several news outlets in Russia reported a cancer breakthrough: Researchers at the chemistry and biophysics institutes affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences had developed a new kind of nanoparticle that could help detect breast cancer in an MRI and kill tumor cells at the same time. State-run media and several Russian science outlets reported on the study over the next few days.

But four years later, Journal of Materials Chemistry B, the journal that had published the paper, retracted it.

The publisher, the Royal Society of Chemistry, found the paper contained repeating patterns in the electron microscopy data and several images depicting cells that were identical to those included in a later paper with a number of the same authors. The authors — who include Vladimir Ivanov, director of Russia’s Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry, and Alexander Baranchikov, also at the institute — all agreed to the retraction.

Winning science fair project in Vietnam beset by misconduct allegations as major high school competition looms

A science competition for middle and high school students in Vietnam is embroiled in controversy as its winners head to next week’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair – widely considered the most prestigious event of its kind. Allegations include cheating and plagiarizing.

Observers in Vietnam noticed the suspect work appears to be especially advanced to have been conducted by two high school students, one of whom is studying mathematics and the other geography. Under the rules of the Vietnam Science and Engineering Fair (ViSEF), the project – titled “Development of multifunctional fire-resistant, heat-insulating, and antimicrobial polyurethane composite materials for application in construction and daily life” – had to have been completed in 12 months while the two student-authors also continued their school work.

Sleuths in a Vietnamese scientific integrity group have found multiple overlaps between the students’ poster and research published in RSC Advances in February 2025. A graph in the students’ poster is almost identical to one in the published paper, according to sleuth Van Tu Duong, although it is plotted in a different color and thickness (see the comparison above). This observation has led to allegations that the students had access to the researchers’ raw data.

Court orders historian to repay grant funding for “pattern of plagiarism” in books

A federal court has ordered a “romance philologist” to repay the Swiss National Science Foundation roughly $51,000 after the group found the author responsible for “massive” scientific misconduct in two grant-funded books.

Carla Rossi, scientific director of the Centro Scaligero degli Studi Danteschi in Verona, Italy, must repay the funding due to extensive plagiarism discovered in the texts, according to the decision by the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland, released in January. Rossi also is barred from applying for grant funding from the foundation for five years, according to the ruling. Rossi is founder and director of Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats in Barcelona and also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition (RECEPTIO) in Switzerland, which operates an academic press that has published Rossi’s works.

The Swiss body issued the funding ban in 2024 and ordered Rossi to repay grants for a total of three books after finding a pattern of plagiarism and lack of transparency during the grant application process, according to a summary in the court decision. Rossi took the foundation to court over the findings, arguing it reviewed incorrect versions of her books and suggesting other versions circulating on the Internet were altered or manipulated by third parties.

ORI announces 15-year debarment against former Rice University scientist

The U.S Office of Research Integrity has formally announced a 15-year funding debarment against a former Rice University scientist for research misconduct, resolving allegations that arose 17 years ago.

Chemist Ariel Fernández intentionally fabricated data in 12 grant-supported papers, four unpublished manuscripts, one presentation and three grant applications while a professor at Rice University in Houston, according to a notice posted May 1 on ORI’s website and to be published in the Federal Register on May 5. As part of the sanctions, Fernández is barred from receiving federal research funds for 15 years. The announcement is the third finding this year from ORI.

The notice follows a decision nearly a year ago by administrative law judge (ALJ) Margaret G. Brakebusch upholding ORI’s findings and recommended debarment, issued in 2022, after an appeal by Fernández. We reported on that ALJ decision after it was made public in February of this year. An exclusion record posted the same day our story ran shows Fernández’s debarment started on March 25. (We reached out to ORI about the case on March 5.)

Weekend reads: A retraction for top cancer researcher; paper mill ads paired to IEEE proceedings; about that study on ChatGPT and learning

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Black marks on published papers don’t change citation rates, new study finds
Researcher claims his case report was stolen by someone else at his hospital
Are AI chatbots infiltrating online survey data? Not yet, says new study
NEJM retracts case study for AI-manipulated imagery

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

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Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

NEJM retracts case study for AI-manipulated imagery

An “Images in Clinical Medicine” item in the *New England Journal of Medicine* has been retracted after the authors acknowledged using AI to alter the photo. *Y. Wang, X. Mu/© The New England Journal of Medicine (2026)*.

The New England Journal of Medicine has retracted a clinical image with a picture the authors admit was manipulated with artificial intelligence.

The short piece, published April 18, reported the case of an 87-year-old man with lung damage after being exposed to a forest fire. The report included a startling image of black “casts” taken from the man’s airways, the size of which can be gauged by a tape measure at the top of the picture.

The dramatic visual drew attention in the media (and one news outlet has already noted the retraction at the time of this writing). But the authors, Yuling Wang and Xiangdong Mu, of Daxing Teaching Hospital and Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, respectively, acknowledged having used AI to superimpose the tape ruler in the figure.

Are AI chatbots infiltrating online survey data? Not yet, says new study

Despite concerns some have raised about potentially compromised data, AI chatbots aren’t yet completing online research surveys widely, according to a new preprint.

The authors of the study, posted earlier this month on PsyArXiv, found that fewer than 1% of around 4,800 survey responses collected by 12 different companies contained text that was likely not written by a human. Among 400 responses from a 13th company, however, around 16% were flagged for possibly being completed by a chatbot.

The study used a novel detection tool created by the survey research company Prolific, which funded the project.

Researcher claims his case report was stolen by someone else at his hospital

A researcher claims a case report he coauthored was plagiarized by doctors at the same institution three years later — a paper he was alerted to when a journal sent it to him for review.

Moayad Alqurashi, an infectious diseases specialist at King Fahad Armed Forces Hospital in Saudi Arabia, was the lead author on a 2021 case report published in Cureus about a patient who came to the emergency room with rapid vision loss. Doctors eventually diagnosed the patient with neurosyphilis, with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, as the presenting symptom. At the time, Alqurashi was a trainee at Prince Sultan Military Medical City in Riyadh.

Alqurashi told Retraction Watch that in 2023, while a reviewer for Skin Health and Disease, a Wiley title, he was invited to assess a report similar to the case he had written about. He said he notified the journal of similarities between the two cases, and the journal never published the report. The authors of that article had seen the same patient as part of a different department.

Black marks on published papers don’t change citation rates, new study finds

Among the data analyzed were mean monthly citations per article for 151 papers that were retracted or issued some other editorial notice, and for a set of control articles. The solid vertical lines are median time to the peak citation month, and the dashed line is median time to the editorial notice.
*H. Studd et al/medRxiv 2026*

Neither retractions, expressions of concern, nor other editorial notices seem to keep authors from continuing to cite problematic papers, according to a look at what happened to more than 170 articles by one author.

“After the public notification of integrity concerns about an article, it would be expected that other authors would no longer cite the article because it is unreliable,” write the authors of a new preprint. But that’s not what they found in a limited comparative study. Whether the study is generalizable has yet to be seen, says one other expert.

Four sleuths – the University of Aberdeen’s Hugo Studd and Alison Avenell and the University of Auckland’s Andrew Grey and Mark J. Bolland – charted citation data for 172 papers on clinical trials from Zatollah Asemi, a nutrition researcher at Kashan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, whose work has come under scrutiny.

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