The search below was me checking how a page we had shipped the day before was ranking. The answer engine cited it - correctly - and then attached the wrong paper to the identifier. I have skin in this game, so every receipt on this page is a public registry record you can check without trusting me.
On 15 August 2026, the day after we shipped a page answering “does PMID 37905776 have a PMCID?”, Google’s AI Overview cited it. The fact it took from the page was right. The paper it attached to the identifier was wrong - a real study that lives at PMID 39075776, the same eight digits in a different order. A second run of the same query, later the same day, got the pairing right. Both answers are preserved below, next to the registry records and a live verifier verdict, because the pair demonstrates something a single run could not: answer engines are probabilistic about the one thing a reference list cannot afford to be probabilistic about - which paper an identifier names.
The identifier 37905776 is actually a PubMed ID (PMID) rather than a PubMed Central ID (PMID 37905776 has no PMCID assigned). It references the following medical study: Title: Describing a medical school's rural activity footprint. Journal: Rural and Remote Health (Published July 2024).
Transcribed from a screenshot captured 2026-08-15 (AEST); AI Overviews have no shareable URL and no version stamp. The fact in the first sentence is correct and correctly attributed. The study described after it is the paper at PMID 39075776, not the paper at the searched identifier.
Two real papers whose PMIDs contain the same eight digits. Records as returned by PubMed and Crossref on 2026-08-15 - unlike an AI answer, these lookups are repeatable.
| PMID 37905776 (searched) | PMID 39075776 (described by run 1) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A letter in The Laryngoscope commenting on a meta-analysis of orofacial myofunctional therapy | A research article on mapping a medical school's rural activity area |
| Title on record | In reference to Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy for Obstructive Sleep Apnea: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis | Describing a medical school's rural activity footprint: setting selection and workforce distribution priorities |
| Authors | Kezirian EJ | Fuller L, Beattie J, Versace VL, Rogers GD, McGrail MR |
| Journal | The Laryngoscope 2024;134(3):E10 | Rural and Remote Health 2024;24(3):8316 |
| DOI | 10.1002/lary.31132 | 10.22605/RRH8316 |
| PubMed record | pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37905776 | pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39075776 |
| PMCID | None assigned | None assigned |
The two PMIDs - 37905776 and 39075776 - contain exactly the same eight digits; three of them have changed position. Digit transposition is one of the oldest transcription errors in bibliography, which is precisely why an identifier should be resolved, not trusted on sight.
Feeding the first run’s claim - the rural-footprint title paired with PMID 37905776 - to the citation verifier on 2026-08-15 returned:
The same input produces the same output tomorrow, because each side of the comparison is a registry lookup. That is the property the answer layer lacked.
PMID 37905776 does not have an assigned PMCID (PubMed Central ID) because the article has not been deposited into the PubMed Central open-access repository. … Title: Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy for Obstructive Sleep Apnea: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal: The Laryngoscope. Author: Eric J. Kezirian. Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1002/lary.31132.
Same query, later the same day: the pairing is now correct, with the same Scholar Sidekick page cited for both the fact and the DOI. One edge stays blurred - the displayed title drops the letter’s “In reference to” prefix, which leaves the letter’s PMID under the exact title of the meta-analysis it comments on (a different paper, PMID 37606313). Whether that is truncation or conflation, a reader cannot tell from the answer alone.
A letter by Eric J. Kezirian in The Laryngoscope (2024;134(3):E10), titled “In reference to Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy for Obstructive Sleep Apnea: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, DOI 10.1002/lary.31132. The PubMed record is at pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37905776. The rural-health study the first AI answer described lives at PMID 39075776.
No. In both runs the highlighted fact - PMID 37905776 has no PMCID because the paper is not deposited in PubMed Central - was correct, and correctly attributed to the page that states it. As it happens the fact is also true of the wrongly described paper: neither PMID has a PMCID. The error was the pairing of identifier and paper, not the fact.
No. The Topaz pattern is a real, resolvable identifier stitched to an invented title. Here both papers are real; a real identifier was paired with the wrong real record. That is the “wrong identifier for a real paper” class - the quieter, more common error - and it is why the verifier returns ambiguous for it rather than a flat real/fake verdict.
Probably not - a second run of the identical query on the same day already showed the correct pairing. AI answer surfaces are session-bound and non-deterministic, which is why this page preserves transcriptions and dated captures rather than a link to the answer. The registry records it checks against are the durable part.
Easily. 37905776 and 39075776 are the same eight digits in a different order, and digit transposition is one of the oldest transcription errors there is. That is the practical lesson: whether a citation was assembled by a person, a reference manager, or a language model, the identifier you publish should be resolved against its registry and compared with what you claim it names.
Resolve the identifier at its own registry (for a PMID, its PubMed record) and compare the resolved title with the claimed one. Or let the citation verifier do both sides: given the first run's exact claim, it resolves PMID 37905776 to the Laryngoscope letter, flags the title and journal disagreement, and surfaces the paper the claimed title really belongs to - PMID 39075776 - as a full-score candidate. Verdict: ambiguous, high confidence.