Science is drowning in AI junk

On a cold Norwegian afternoon earlier this month, Dan Quintana, a psychology professor at the University of Oslo, decided to stay home and complete a tedious task he had been putting off for weeks. An editor at a well-known journal in his field had asked him to review a paper he was considering publishing. It seemed like a simple piece of science. Nothing raised alarm bells until Quintana glanced at the references and saw his own name. The citation of his work appeared to be correct – it contained a plausible title and named authors with whom he had collaborated in the past – but the work to which it referred did not exist.

Every day on Bluesky and LinkedIn, Quintana had seen academics posting about finding these “phantom quotes” in academic papers. (The first version of the Trump administration’s “MAHA report” on children’s health, released last spring, contained more than half a dozen of them.) But until Quintana found a fake “Quintana”…