I have a preprint out estimating how many scholarly papers are written using chatGPT etc? I estimate upwards of 60k articles (>1% of global output) published in 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16887

How can we identify this? Simple: there are certain words that LLMs love, and they suddenly start showing up *a lot* last year. Twice as many papers call something "intricate", big rises for "commendable" and "meticulous".

#bibliometrics #scholcomm #chatgpt

ChatGPT "contamination": estimating the prevalence of LLMs in the scholarly literature

The use of ChatGPT and similar Large Language Model (LLM) tools in scholarly communication and academic publishing has been widely discussed since they became easily accessible to a general audience in late 2022. This study uses keywords known to be disproportionately present in LLM-generated text to provide an overall estimate for the prevalence of LLM-assisted writing in the scholarly literature. For the publishing year 2023, it is found that several of those keywords show a distinctive and disproportionate increase in their prevalence, individually and in combination. It is estimated that at least 60,000 papers (slightly over 1% of all articles) were LLM-assisted, though this number could be extended and refined by analysis of other characteristics of the papers or by identification of further indicative keywords.

arXiv.org

I looked at 24 words that were identified as distinctively LLMish (interestingly, almost all positive) and checked their presence in full text of papers - four showed very strong increases, six medium, and two relatively weak but still noticeable. Looking at the number of these published each year let us estimate the size of the "excess" in 2023. Very simple & straightforward, but striking results.

#bibliometrics #scholcomm #chatgpt

Can we say any one of those papers specifically was written with ChatGPT by looking for those words? No - this is just a high level survey. It's the totals that give it away.

Can we say what fraction of those were "ChatGPT generated" rather than just copyedited/assisted? No - but my suspicions are very much raised.

Isn't this all a very simplistic analysis? Yes - I just wanted to get it out in the world sooner rather than later. Hence a fast preprint.

#bibliometrics #scholcomm #chatgpt

Is it getting worse? You bet. Difficult to be confident for 2024 papers but I'd wildly guess rates have tripled so far. And it's *March*.

Is this a bad thing? You tell me. If it's a tell for LLM-generated papers, I think we can all agree "yes". If it's just widespread copyediting, a bit more ambiguous. But even if the content is OK, will very widespread chatGPT-ification of papers start stylistically messing up later LLMs built on them? Maybe...

#bibliometrics #scholcomm #chatgpt

Is there more we could look at here? Definitely. Test for different tells - the list here was geared to distinctive words *on peer reviews*, which have a different expected style to papers. Test for frequency of those terms (not just "shows up once"). Figure out where they're coming from (there seems to be subject variance etc).

Glad I've got something out there for now, though.

#bibliometrics #scholcomm #chatgpt

@generalising Interesting! I also suspect we'll see a tendency for humans to imitate the style of LLMs, as LLMese becomes a widely used, computer-endorsed, and thus relatively prestigious dialect. (I suspect I'm starting to see this among students already.)

It's good news at least for "outwith", though. I take that as some compensation for the war that spellcheckers have been waging on the word for years.

@ncdominie @generalising This is a depressing truth you have just revealed to me.