A Columbia University-led team reported that fabricated references are embedded in biomedical literature at rising rates, based on an audit of nearly 2.5 million biomedical papers and 97 million PubMed Central citations. The findings, published in The Lancet, found more than 4,000 fabricated references buried across nearly 3,000 papers. The study’s authors tie the acceleration to broader adoption of AI tools in research workflows. They report that the share of papers containing at least one fake reference grew from about one in 2,828 papers in 2023 to one in 458 last year, and that over the first seven weeks of 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one non-existent reference. Universities and journals face a governance and integrity test: citation verification, tool validation, and retraction-risk management when AI-generated errors move from drafting assistance into the permanent body of knowledge.