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In 2025, peer-reviewed journals published 147,000 citations to studies that don't exist !!

Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-05-28

A study analyzing 2.5 million peer-reviewed papers found 147,000 citations to non-existent studies published in 2025, with AI hallucinations generating fictitious authors and journals that peer review failed to detect.

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Extraction

Topics: ai-hallucinationscientific-integritypeer-reviewcitation-fraud

Claims

  • In 2025, peer-reviewed journals contained 147,000 citations to studies that do not exist.
  • Researchers analyzed 2.5 million papers to identify the fabricated citations.
  • AI systems generated fictitious studies, authors, and journals that were not caught by peer review processes.

Key quotes

In 2025, peer-reviewed journals published 147,000 citations to studies that don't exist !!
AI made them up. Nobody caught the problem.