The letter to the editor, published in December 2024 in Intensive Care Medicine, explored ways AI could help clinicians monitor blood circulation in patients in intensive care units. The 750-word letter included 15 references. Retraction Watch were able to locate the cited papers for five of the references, although one of them had an error in the publication year, and another had a different author order, page numbers and slight variations in the title. For the remaining 10, we couldn’t find articles with matching titles, either in the journal cited or any journal at all.

On November 29, 2025 the editor-in-chief retracted the letter, according to the notice. “The authors have stated that these non-existent references resulted from the use of generative AI to convert the PubMed IDs of cited articles into a structured reference list,” the notice states. “As a result, the Editor-in-Chief no longer has confidence in the reliability of the contents of the article.” The retraction notice also states “the peer review process had not been carried out in accordance with the journal’s editorial policies.”

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/28/medical-journal-publishes-a-paper-on-ai-with-a-fake-reference-to-itself/

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