^1,2,3Maxim Topaz, ¹Pallavi Gupta, ⁴Zhihong Zhang, ^5,6,7Laura-Maria Peltonen
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 123, e2623869123
Open Source Link to Article [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2623869123]

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

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.