The Journal of Medical Ethics has retracted a paper on the use of AI in the pharmaceutical industry for containing references that don’t exist. The article’s sole author: a high school student. The paper, which argues biased algorithms can exacerbate inequities in health care, was published in September, 2026. The author, Irfan Biswas, listed his affiliation as Shrewsbury Public Schools in Massachusetts.

Last year another ethics journal made a similar retraction after a reader found fabricated references in a paper on whistleblowing. The Biswas article joins the estimated one in 277 papers indexed in PubMed with fabricated references, a phenomenon that came about with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/06/ethics-journal-retracts-paper-by-high-school-student-for-ai-peer-review-manipulation/

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