No. 007

Publishing & Integrity

• Fabricated citations: an audit across 2.5 million biomedical papers

  The Lancet, May 7 2026

  A Columbia-led audit of 97 million references found fabricated citations in 1 of every 277 PubMed-indexed papers in early 2026, a 12-fold increase from 2023, with the sharpest rise coinciding with the adoption of AI writing tools in mid-2024.

• Rethinking Publication: A Certification Framework for AI-Enabled Research

  arXiv, April 23 2026

  Lu et al. propose decoupling knowledge certification from human-contribution attribution in publishing, grading AI-enabled research into three tiers by the degree of human involvement required, a structural response to the fact that disclosure-only policies have produced 0.1% compliance rates despite 70% mandate adoption.

Research Practice

• Doing Vibe Physics: How GPT-5.x derived new results in theoretical physics and quantum gravity

  Latent Space, May 2026

  Alex Lupsasca describes using GPT-5.x to derive original results in theoretical physics and quantum gravity, a concrete case of an LLM contributing to frontier research rather than summarizing it, and the kind of work that forces the certification-vs-contribution split Lu et al. are trying to formalize.

• Evaluating Claude's bioinformatics research capabilities with BioMysteryBench

  Anthropic Research, April 30 2026

  A 99-question bioinformatics benchmark built with domain experts found that Claude Mythos solved 30% of problems human experts could not collectively solve, but on hard problems it succeeded only once or twice in five attempts, a gap between capability and reliability that matters for actual research workflows.

Infrastructure & Discovery

• Zero-Click Readership: Are AI Overviews Changing the Way We Discover Research

  The Scholarly Kitchen, May 6 2026

  AI-generated search summaries are collapsing the research discovery cycle from "search, scan, click, read, cite" to "search, read overview, move on," creating a measurement crisis where downloads and citations no longer reflect how work is actually consumed.

• $200M Gift to USC Will Advance AI Research

  Inside Higher Ed, May 6 2026

  USC received $200 million from Nvidia board member Mark Stevens to integrate AI across disciplines and renamed its computing school, a bet that universities should focus on domain applications rather than competing on frontier model development.