A World Bank report on obesity trends with at least 14 fake references in the text has been removed from the website and is being reviewed by the organization following a Retraction Watch inquiry.
The report, “Nourishing Tomorrow: Addressing Obesity Through Food Systems in South Asia,” was published in March 2025 in the World Bank Group’s Open Knowledge Repository. The document describes an analysis of how different food systems contribute to rising rates of obesity in South Asian countries. Three of its four authors are employees of the World Bank.
Muhammad Azam first came across the report in a WhatsApp group for sports science research in Pakistan, he told us. Azam, of the Government College University Lahore, has studied the prevalence of sports science research published in predatory journals in that country. So when a group member shared that some publications Azam knew to be suspect had been cited in the report, he took a closer look and found several “problematic entries,” he told us.
We reviewed 148 references to academic articles and found 14 were to papers that do not exist. We also reviewed 32 of the 218 references to reports, policy documents, and news articles cited, and at least 14 could not be found or verified.
When we reached out to the World Bank Group with evidence of the citations, they responded with the statement: “The World Bank Group expects its researchers to uphold high professional standards, including the accurate use of sources. The paper is being removed for review and will be republished with a note clearly describing any corrections.” The spokesperson did not respond to our question about the review process for reports.
The four authors of the report did not respond directly to our requests for comment asking how the fake citations may have ended up in the document. The authors who are affiliated with the World Bank include Hideki Higashi, a senior economist; Deepika Anand, an operations officer; and Libby Hattersley, a nutrition specialist. The fourth author is Santu Ghosh, an associate professor at St. John’s Medical College in Karnataka, India.
The report was downloaded 133 times before it was taken down, according to an archived version of the website. The current version of the website says the report has been withdrawn.
Azam said he is concerned the report comes from an organization with “global authority,” noting the issue raises questions about “the integrity of the evidence base that informs international policy.”
Cases of fake references have skyrocketed in recent years and are common in text generated by large language models like ChatGPT. In July, Springer Nature retracted a book with fake citations, as we previously reported. More recently, we covered a paper with a fabricated reference to one of our cofounders, one of many in the article.
Retraction Watch Sleuth in Residence David Robert Grimes contributed to the analysis in this article.
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