Surge in fake citations uncovered by audit of 2.5 million biomedical science papers

The reference integrity audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers spans 3 years of scientific publishing. Credit: Aramyan/Getty An audit of 2.5 million academic papers has identified nearly 3,000 biomedical-science papers that contain fake references — ones that could not be traced to known publications. The findings, published in The Lancet on 7 May 1 , are contained in the first academic study to estimate the scale of fake citations in the biomedical literature. …