Evaluation of possibly fabricated references in 500,000 science, engineering, and computing papers
7 affiliations
- 1School of Nursing, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032
- 2Data Science Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027
- 3Center for Home Care Policy & Research, VNS Health, New York, NY 10017
- 4Department of Health and Social Management, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio 70211, Finland
- 5Wellbeing Services County of North Savo, Kuopio 70211, Finland
- 6Wellbeing Services County of Southwest Finland, Turku 20521, Finland
- 7Department of Nursing Science, University of Turku, Turku 20014, Finland
Abstract
References to nonexistent studies are well documented in biomedical research, but evidence outside biomedicine is limited. We analyzed a stratified random sample of 500,000 peer-reviewed journal papers in chemistry, physics, materials science, engineering, and computer science published from January 2023 through March 31, 2026, using OpenAlex, a large open index of scholarly works and citations. Our automated pipeline classified 1,135 references across 619 papers as fabricated, with 85.8% precision on masked expert review; fabricated is an operational label for a claimed title that could not be located in any of seven bibliographic and open-web sources. Affected-paper prevalence rose from 1 in 1,600 (6.3 per 10,000) in 2023 to 1 in 435 (23.0 per 10,000) in the first quarter of 2026, and full-period rates differed roughly sixfold across fields, from 25.6 per 10,000 papers in physics to 4.3 in chemistry. Most affected papers contained one or two fabricated references, but the 27 papers containing five or more accounted for more than a third of all fabricated references identified. Applying each field’s rate to the approximately 7 million OpenAlex papers indexed in these fields gives an estimated 8,500 papers carrying at least one fabricated reference. Routine automated reference verification at submission, together with retrospective screening of the published literature, can detect fabricated references before and after they enter the scientific record.
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BibTeX
@article{topaz2026evaluation,
title = {{Evaluation of possibly fabricated references in 500,000 science, engineering, and computing papers}},
author = {Maxim Topaz and Pallavi Gupta and Zhihong Zhang and Laura-Maria Peltonen},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1073/pnas.2623869123},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2623869123},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Evaluation of possibly fabricated references in 500,000 science, engineering, and computing papers
AU - Maxim Topaz
AU - Pallavi Gupta
AU - Zhihong Zhang
AU - Laura-Maria Peltonen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2623869123
UR - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2623869123
AB - References to nonexistent studies are well documented in biomedical research, but evidence outside biomedicine is limited. We analyzed a stratified random sample of 500,000 peer-reviewed journal papers in chemistry, physics, materials science, engineering, and computer science published from January 2023 through March 31, 2026, using OpenAlex, a large open index of scholarly works and citations. Our automated pipeline classified 1,135 references across 619 papers as fabricated, with 85.8% precision on masked expert review; fabricated is an operational label for a claimed title that could not be located in any of seven bibliographic and open-web sources. Affected-paper prevalence rose from 1 in 1,600 (6.3 per 10,000) in 2023 to 1 in 435 (23.0 per 10,000) in the first quarter of 2026, and full-period rates differed roughly sixfold across fields, from 25.6 per 10,000 papers in physics to 4.3 in chemistry. Most affected papers contained one or two fabricated references, but the 27 papers containing five or more accounted for more than a third of all fabricated references identified. Applying each field’s rate to the approximately 7 million OpenAlex papers indexed in these fields gives an estimated 8,500 papers carrying at least one fabricated reference. Routine automated reference verification at submission, together with retrospective screening of the published literature, can detect fabricated references before and after they enter the scientific record.
SN - 0027-8424
SN - 1091-6490
ER -