We’ve seen all kinds of articles that got published despite having references that don’t exist. But this was a new one: a paper with a made-up reference to the journal in which it appears.
While nonexistent references can indicate the use of a large language model in generating text, the authors maintain they used AI according to the journal’s guidelines.
The letter to the editor, published in December 2024 in Intensive Care Medicine, explored ways AI could help clinicians monitor blood circulation in patients in intensive care units. The 750-word letter included 15 references.
After we reached out to Eren Öğüt, his profiles at Google Scholar, ORCID and Frontiers’ Loop all vanished.
The reviewer, a neuroscientist in Germany, was confused. The manuscript on her screen, describing efforts to model a thin layer of gray matter in the brain called the indusium griseum, seemed oddly devoid of gist. The figures in the single-authored article made little sense, the MATLAB functions provided were irrelevant, the discussion failed to engage with the results and felt more like a review of the literature.
And, the reviewer wondered, was the resolution of the publicly available MRI data the manuscript purported to analyze sufficient to visualize the delicate anatomical structure in the first place? She turned to a colleague who sat in the same office. An expert in analyzing brain images, he confirmed her suspicion: The resolution was too low. (Both researchers spoke to us on condition of anonymity.)
The reviewer suggested rejecting the manuscript, which had been submitted to Springer Nature’s Brain Topography. But in November, just a few weeks later, the colleague she had consulted received an invitation to review the same paper, this time for Scientific Reports. He accepted out of curiosity. A figure supposed to depict the indusium griseum but showing a simple sine wave baffled him. “You look at that and think, well, this is not looking like an anatomical structure,” he told us.
Nature has retracted a paper after an investigation at a U.K. institution found the first author — then a doctoral student — manipulated data.
The paper, which looked at the sensitivity of lung cancers to immunotherapy, appeared in April 2023 and has been cited 192 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The retraction notice published today states first author Kevin Ng was responsible for the manipulation in the paper, including manipulated data in several figures. At the time of the experiments, Ng was a Ph.D. student at the Francis Crick Institute in London under the supervision of co-corresponding author George Kassiotis.
Nature has retracted a paper on melanoma after an investigation by the journal found issues with data that rendered certain results statistically insignificant. A separate institutional investigation concluded misconduct wasn’t involved, the lead author says.
The research behind the article, published in April 2016, was conducted in the lab of Ashani Weeraratna, then at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. The paper has been cited 332 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study investigated how the tumor microenvironment affected the spread of young versus aged cells.
An editorial investigation found some results in a figure were “no longer statistically significant, which affects the conclusions about therapy resistance,” according to the October 29 retraction notice. The inquiry also found “several errors in image and source data consistency,” as well as errors with the sample numbers given in the original study.
Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing.
Erja Moore, an independent researcher based in Finland, came across the article while looking into a whistleblowing case in that country. “I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”
Update, Nov. 24, 2025, 5:48 p.m. UTC: This story was updated to add comment from Mohammad Abdollahi, the editor-in-chief of the journal and last author of the paper.
Tips we get about papers and books citing fake references have skyrocketed this year, tracking closely with the rise of ChatGPT and other generative large language models. One in particular hit close to home: A paper containing a reference to an article by our cofounder Ivan Oransky that he did not write.
The paper with the nonexistent reference, published November 13 in DARU Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, criticizes platforms for post-publication peer review — and PubPeer specifically — as being vulnerable to “misuse” and “hyper-skepticism.” Five of the paper’s 17 references do not appear to exist, three others have incorrect DOIs or links, and one has been retracted.
One of the fabricated references credits our cofounder Ivan Oransky with a nonexistent article, “A new kind of watchdog is shaking up research,” purportedly published in Nature in 2019.
Millions of researchers could be affected by a “dramatic distortion of citation counts” likely caused by flaws in how the academic publishing giant Springer Nature handles article metadata, according to a new preprint.
The bug means a large number of citations are automatically attributed to the first paper in a given journal volume, instead of to whichever paper in that volume they were intended for. The issue appears to affect many of the publisher’s online-only titles, such as Nature Communications, Scientific Reports and several BMC journals.
“It seems that millions of scientists lost a few citations, while tens of thousands, the authors of Article 1s, gained all these, leading to insane citation counts,” Tamás Kriváchy of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, in Spain, told us. His findings appeared earlier this month on arXiv.org. And those citation losses and gains are through no fault (or intention) of the authors themselves. In fact, one author we spoke with has tried, without success, to get mistaken citations removed from her paper.
What would you do if you discovered your name in a list of experts on sex robots despite having never studied sex robots?
That was the situation for one rather panicked researcher who reached out to us in late September after discovering his name among several singled out in a review article for the “greatest number of published works” on sex robots.
Published in February in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the bibliometric analysis of the field aimed “to provide a clearer understanding of the issues surrounding sex robots,” the original article stated.
The chief executive of a university in Eastern India whose research is full of tortured phrases – possible signs of plagiarism – had two papers pulled in December after investigations found evidence of “compromised” peer review and other red flags in the publications.
A third article by the executive, Amiya Kumar Rath, has also come under scrutiny, a publisher told us.
Rath became vice chancellor of Biju Patnaik University of Technology in Rourkela in 2023. A computer scientist with more than 100 publications, he is listed as the second author of one of the now-withdrawn works, a 2020 review article on inspecting and grading fruits using machine learning.
A journal has retracted a 2025 paper on social media and anxiety after a reader raised questions about the data – and thanks to the mentorship of a sleuth or two.
The article appeared in 2023 in BMC Psychology, a Springer Nature title. The sole author was Li Sun, whose affiliation is listed as the School of Marxism at Zhoukou Vocational and Technical College, in China.
According to the abstract of the paper, the research explored “the impact of mindfulness-based mobile apps on university students’ anxiety, loneliness, and well-being.” Those apps were “Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer” which “offer a range of mindfulness exercises and resources for users to explore.”
