A Lancet study analyzing 2.5 million biomedical papers found fabricated citations jumped 12-fold between early 2023 and February 2026, with roughly 1 in 277 papers now containing fake references. This reflects the scale of AI-generated 'hallucinations' being embedded into scholarly work as researchers use language models without verification. Publishers and institutions are now deploying detection tools, but the finding underscores how quickly AI output can contaminate peer-reviewed literature when citation practices aren't manually verified.