On how AI tools handle evidence, and how they don't. Written for people who do serious research and need to know what to trust.
A claim can be true, correctly cited, and pass peer review — and still be evidentially fragile. A new paper from Lexsi Labs formalises this as the audit gap: the divergence between the evidence governance frameworks demand and the evidence current assurance methods can actually produce.
A Lancet audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers found fabricated citations rising 12x in three years. The fake references look real, correct formatting, genuine author names, plausible titles. Here's what reference integrity checking actually requires, and why most tools don't do it.
When forty papers cite the same finding, that looks like consensus. Often it isn't. Source diversity, not source count, is what makes evidence reliable. Here's why most research tools can't tell the difference, and why it matters for anyone doing work that has to hold up.