# Proof Narrative: The paper "Goh AC, Gill IS. Wallace anastomosis in complex dissections. Eur Urol Focus. (2024) 11:80–8" does not exist.

## Verdict

**Verdict: SUPPORTED**

A systematic search of the major scholarly databases found no trace of this paper anywhere — and two separate red flags show the citation was never describing a real article in the first place.

## What Was Claimed?

The claim is simply that a particular academic paper does not exist. The paper is named by a full citation: authors A.C. Goh and I.S. Gill, the title "Wallace anastomosis in complex dissections," the journal *European Urology Focus*, the year 2024, volume 11, pages 80 to 88.

This matters because the citation looks completely ordinary. The two authors are real, well-known urologic surgeons. *European Urology Focus* is a real medical journal. "Wallace anastomosis" is a real surgical technique. A citation that combines real, plausible parts is exactly the kind of thing that slips past a busy reader — or a peer reviewer — without a second look. Confirming whether the paper behind it actually exists is the difference between a trustworthy reference and a fabricated one.

## What Did We Find?

The paper could not be found in any of the four largest scholarly indexes. PubMed, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's database, returned nothing for the title and nothing for any article by this author in this journal. Europe PMC — which pools PubMed, full-text archives, preprints and more — returned nothing. OpenAlex, an index of roughly 250 million scholarly works, returned nothing. Crossref, the registry through which the journal's own publisher assigns a permanent identifier to every article it publishes, had no record of it. A real 2024 or 2025 article in this journal would necessarily appear in Crossref, and would almost certainly appear in the others too. All four agreed: there is no such paper.

The single place the citation does appear is telling. It turns up once on the open web — inside the reference list of a 2025 article in another journal, *Frontiers in Oncology*. But a line in a reference list is only a claim that a paper exists; it is not the paper itself. And that reference list turned out to be the source of the problem, not evidence against it.

When the neighbouring references in that same list were checked, a pattern emerged. Several of them carry digital identifiers that, when followed, lead to completely different papers — different titles, different journals, different years. One "2024" reference actually points to a 2021 paper; another points to a 2013 paper; another to a 2005 paper. The disputed reference has no identifier at all. This is the signature of fabricated, likely AI-generated citations.

There was also a contradiction inside the citation itself. *European Urology Focus* publishes one volume per year, starting from volume 1 in 2015. That makes volume 11 the 2025 volume — not 2024. The citation pairs "2024" with "volume 11," a combination no genuine article in this journal could ever have. The citation is internally impossible.

## What Should You Keep In Mind?

No search can prove a negative with absolute certainty — that is why the verdict is "SUPPORTED" rather than "PROVED." In principle, a real article could exist while being missing from all four major indexes and from its publisher's own registry. For a recent article in an established journal, that is a negligible possibility, but it is one this kind of proof cannot logically rule out.

It is worth being precise about what was disproven. The authors are real and have published together; the technique and the journal are real. What does not exist is this specific paper. The citation appears to be a fabrication that borrowed real names and a real journal — a reminder to verify references before relying on them, especially in AI-assisted writing.

## How Was This Verified?

The conclusion comes from documented, repeatable searches of four independent scholarly databases, plus direct checks of the citation's only appearance and of its internal consistency. You can read [the structured proof report](proof.md), inspect [the full verification audit](proof_audit.md), or [re-run the proof yourself](proof.py).
