3,000 Plus Biomedical Papers Cite Medical Research That Never Existed

Millions funded by false evidence traced to fabricated citations

A new audit published in The Lancet has flagged large-scale fabrication in biomedical literature, finding thousands of citations pointing to medical research that does not exist. Researchers identified 4,046 fabricated references across 2,810 published papers, raising alarms about how misinformation can enter peer-reviewed work and distort future studies, clinical decisions, and funding priorities.