Viewpoint analysis demonstrates a rapid rise in fabricated references across biomedical publishing, highlighting automated screening as a vital safeguard.
Fabricated references, citations to nonexistent sources, appeared at a rate of 56.9 per 10 000 biomedical papers indexed in early 2026, a more than 12-fold increase since 2023. Manuscript volume is rising faster than editorial capacity, and conventional peer review does not routinely verify references. This viewpoint argues that automated reference verification, integrated into submission workflows, is a practical and proportionate response. The technical readiness of current tools, the evidence gaps and economic barriers to adoption, and the structured editorial response triggered by fabricated references are examined. The core principle is ‘artificial intelligence should handle the verifiable; humans should judge the evaluable’.
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Topaz et al. (2026) studied this question.
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