Expert: Retraction Watch editorial team, Research-integrity watchdog publication **The reference list was not reliable — ten of the fifteen citations point to articles that do not exist.** *Intensive Care Medicine*, the journal of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine published by Springer Nature, ran a 750-word letter to the editor in December 2024 exploring how AI could help clinicians monitor blood circulation in intensive care patients. The letter carried 15 references. Retraction Watch could locate the cited papers for only **five** of them — and even those had defects: one had an error in the publication year, another a different author order, different page numbers and slight variations in the title. For the remaining **ten**, no article matching the cited title could be found in the journal named, or in any journal at all. The most striking entry was **reference 11**, cited as a paper on integrating AI-driven hemodynamic monitoring in intensive care, published in *Intensive Care Medicine* itself. No such article exists in the journal — nor does any article in the journal carry the listed authors. The letter contained a fabricated citation to the very journal that published it. On 4 November the publisher added an editor's note stating that “concerns regarding the presence of nonexistent references have been raised.” On 29 November the editor-in-chief retracted the letter. The retraction notice records the authors' own explanation: the non-existent references “resulted from the use of generative AI to convert the PubMed IDs of cited articles into a structured reference list.” The notice adds that “the peer review process had not been carried out in accordance with the journal's editorial policies,” and that the editor-in-chief “no longer has confidence in the reliability of the contents of the article.” The authors dispute the severity of that outcome. Alexander Vlaar, professor of intensive care medicine at Amsterdam University Medical Center and corresponding author on the letter, referred questions to his institution. Press officer Edith Verheul told Retraction Watch: “The content of the letter was original; no AI was used beyond what is allowed by the publisher... these inaccuracies were the result of a formatting error caused by the permitted use of AI. For this reason, publishing a correction would have been a more appropriate response.” But the journal's own author guidelines — which do permit LLMs for “AI assisted copy editing” without declaration — explicitly exclude “generative editorial work and autonomous content creation” and require “human accountability for the final version of the text.” Converting a list of PubMed IDs into a reference list is not copy editing. Jordan Schilling, publishing director, medicine, for Springer Journals, told Retraction Watch the publisher first learned of concerns with the article in January 2025, and apologised for the length of the investigation. **The takeaway:** an AI-use policy by itself does not catch unverifiable citations. Reference-level checking remains the responsibility of the authors and the editors — a fabricated citation is indistinguishable from a real one until somebody actually looks it up. Source: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/28/medical-journal-publishes-a-paper-on-ai-with-a-fake-reference-to-itself/