Evaluation of possibly fabricated references in 500,000 science, engineering, and computing papers

References to nonexistent studies are well documented in biomedical research, but evidence outside biomedicine is limited. We analyzed a stratified random sample of 500,000 peer-reviewed journal papers in chemistry, physics, materials science, engineering, and computer science published from January 2023 through March 31, 2026, using OpenAlex, a large open index of scholarly works and citations. Our automated pipeline classified 1,135 references across 619 papers as fabricated, with 85.8% precision on masked expert review; fabricated is an operational label for a claimed title that could not be located in any of seven bibliographic and open-web sources. Affected-paper prevalence rose from 1 in 1,600 (6.3 per 10,000) in 2023 to 1 in 435 (23.0 per 10,000) in the first quarter of 2026, and full-period rates differed roughly sixfold across fields, from 25.6 per 10,000 papers in physics to 4.3 in chemistry. Most affected papers contained one or two fabricated references, but the 27 papers containing five or more accounted for more than a third of all fabricated references identified. Applying each field’s rate to the approximately 7 million OpenAlex papers indexed in these fields gives an estimated 8,500 papers carrying at least one fabricated reference. Routine automated reference verification at submission, together with retrospective screening of the published literature, can detect fabricated references before and after they enter the scientific record.