Claim Verification: "Topaz et al. (2026) analyzed 2.5 million biomedical papers in PubMed Central from January 2023 through February 2026 and identified 4,046 references pointing to studies that do not exist, distributed across 2,810 papers." — Proved

Automated fact-verification of the claim: "Topaz et al. (2026) analyzed 2.5 million biomedical papers in PubMed Central from January 2023 through February 2026 and identified 4,046 references pointing to studies that do not exist, distributed across 2,810 papers." Verdict: PROVED Files proof.py — Re-runnable Python verification script proof.md — Structured proof report proof_audit.md — Full verification audit trail proof_narrative.md — Plain-language summary proof.json — Machine-readable structured data provenance.json — W3C PROV-JSON provenance chain proof.ipynb — Jupyter Notebook (interactive re-verification) ro-crate-metadata.json — RO-Crate 1.1 research object manifest Generated by Proof Engine v1.34.0.