India, May 14 -- A new review published in The Lancet found that thousands of references used in biomedical research papers may be fake.
"When those fake references are making it into the literature, they will end up in those guidelines, and that's how doctors decide how to provide care for you," lead author Maxim Topaz, an associate professor at the Columbia School of Nursing, told CBS News. "Your doctor could be making decisions around treatment based on studies that never existed."
Researchers from Columbia University used artificial intelligence (AI) to examine 2.5 million research papers published between 2023 and early 2026. They checked 97.1 million references to see whether the cited studies actually existed and matched the inform...