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Forty-Two Percent of Biomedical Model Uses Were on a Retirement Clock
A review of 5,242 papers found that many relied on commercial models already retired at publication or scheduled to disappear within two years.
Summary
A review of 5,242 papers found that many relied on commercial models already retired at publication or scheduled to disappear within two years.
Researchers searched PubMed for biomedical studies from 2022 through March 2026 that applied a named language model. After normalizing 8,931 mentions in 5,242 publications to the 50 most frequently used models, they found that 77.7 percent referred to commercial closed-weight systems. Forty-two percent involved a model already retired by official publication or scheduled for retirement within two years; the median interval from publication to retirement was 538 days. The figures depend on the authors' extraction and lifecycle records, but they expose a preservation problem: a method can remain in print after the computational object it used is no longer available.
Why it matters
A review of 5,242 papers found that many relied on commercial models already retired at publication or scheduled to disappear within two years.
Limits and context
- The figures depend on the authors' extraction and lifecycle records, but they expose a preservation problem: a method can remain in print after the computational object it used is no longer available.
Key claims
A review of 5,242 papers found that many relied on commercial models already retired at publication or scheduled to disappear within two years.
Qualification: The figures depend on the authors' extraction and lifecycle records, but they expose a preservation problem: a method can remain in print after the computational object it used is no longer available.
Evidence: source-2026-09-08-003
Sources
- arXiv preprint 2609.04699arXiv · primary research
Corrections
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