Fabricated citations in biomedical papers increased tenfold from 2023 to 2026. One in 277 papers now carries a fake reference, and 98.4 percent of flagged papers remain uncorrected. The field is responding with automation: citation verification pipelines, AI detection products, and platform bans. But automated enforcement produces false positives, and an author wrongly flagged has no record to produce in rebuttal.

This episode covers the working paper "Fault-Based Publication Ethics: The Case for Source Custody in an Era of AI Citation Contamination" (SSRN Abstract ID 6872038), which proposes a five-level fault ladder separating fabrication from failure to verify from negligent verification from downstream contamination from source decay, and a Source Provenance Ledger that makes verification effort visible.

The paper's own citations  ...