21 Recent Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

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AI reviewers make it easier to get research published. US study calls it paper-laundering – The Print

Doctored data sets could trick AI agents - Nature

Award-winning Korea studies scholar accused of using AI-fabricated citations – NK News

AI tools meant to vet science are surprisingly easy to fool – Science News

‘Humanizer’ tool can erase signs of AI-written text — alarming scientists – Nature

AI-assisted reviews will result in ordinary, uncontroversial research – The Times Higher Ed

AI Slop Is a Tenure Problem, Not Just a Tech Problem – Inside Higher Ed

In the AI era, the human struggle can no longer be the point of research - The Times Higher Ed

Artificial intelligence in scientific review and writing: What should we be doing? – Oxford Acamdemic

A large language model pipeline for automated citation quality scoring across engineering journal quartiles with expert validation – Nature

Research integrity in the age of AI (podcast) - The Lancet

French research thrown into turmoil by a multifaceted crisis that includes funding, publishing volume, and AI – Le Monde  

University launches investigation into its faculty member's paper allegedly containing AI watermarks in graphics – Global Times

Scientists decry conference’s use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews – The Transmitter

New AI Agents Pose ‘Existential Threat’ to How Grants Are Awarded – Inside Higher Ed

Publication fraud in the era of generative artificial intelligence – British Pharmacological Society

Anyone can fake a scientific image with AI, tricking even academic journals – and undermining trust in science – The Conversation

AI promised to democratise academic publishing – the evidence says otherwise – The London School of Economics

Journal investigating paper on cognitive impact of generative AI – Retraction Watch

Did AI write this article? Perish the thought. But we tracked how artificial intelligence is changing five creative fields – The Economist

Scientists want you to read their research papers—so they’re using gen AI to turn them into TikTok videos – Fast Company

AI is eating the academic publishing industry alive

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If the exposure of AI-generated slop, hallucinated references, fabricated data and voiceless prose brings about the downfall of the Big Five (academic) publishing oligopoly, I cannot mourn it. An industry that profits so spectacularly from unpaid labour, that sells publicly funded research to the public at an enormous mark-up, that has used its stranglehold on prestige to distort what universities are for, well, this industry deserves disruption. - Sioux McKenna writing in the Daily Maverick

17 Recent Articles about AI & Academic Research

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37 Recent Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

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AI tools are smuggling biases in their summaries – The London School of Economics & Political Science  

Plagiarism of ideas in the age of generative artificial intelligence - Nature  

AI research papers are getting better, and it’s a big problem for scientists. – The Verge

Fraudulent citations, blamed on AI hallucinations, are becoming more common in research papers – Stat

Researchers who use hallucinated references to face arXiv ban - Nature

 Will Make the Academic Article Obsolete – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI agents may be skilled researchers—but not always honest ones – Science.org 

Safeguards against GenAI hallucinations in literature review – Times Higher Ed 

As researchers aim for universal AI disclosure guidelines, the devil is in the details - Science.org

Retractions ‘must be the start of AI slop clean-up’, says critic – Times Higher Ed

AI Slop Is Flooding Academic Journals. A Top Journal Measured It - Forbes

First AI tool to detect suspicious peer reviews rolled out by academic publisher - Nature  

Performance of AI Tools in Citing Retracted Literature – JMIR Publishing  

The AI scientist: now academic papers can be fully automated, what does this mean for the future of research? – The Conversation  

How AI is Quietly Distorting Academic Enquiry and what to do about it – Times Higher Ed

Meet the academics refusing to use generative AI - Nature

Modeling scientific uncertainty in language: Applied linguistic insights from human and artificial intelligence texts – Science Direct

Researchers already use AI—it’s time to agree on how to use it responsibly – Research Professional News 

Illicit Use of AI by Philosophers Refereeing for Journals – Daily Nous 

Artificial intelligence in the retraction spotlight – Frontiers  

Detecting Fraud-Associated Characteristics In The Medical AI Literature: A Multi-Signal NLP Framework Reveals Distinct Paper Mill Subtypes - Open Science Framework

Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems? - Nature 

Study: AI Policies Fail to Reduce Undisclosed AI Use – The Scientist

Do Large Language Models know Which Published Articles have been Retracted? – ArXiv

AI Wrote A Harvard Physicist’s Most Recent Paper. No One Knows What It Means for Science – The Crimson 

No humans allowed: scientific AI agents get their own social network - Nature  

Enacting AI disclosure in scholarly publishing – Wily 

Harvard says researcher who published nearly 100 articles in 2 1/2 years has no affiliation with the university – Free Beacon  

Institutional support for ethical AI adoption in higher education amid the rising trend of manuscript retractions - Nature 

AI Can Improve Scholarly Writing — If We Use It Right – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI Conferences Should Embrace Submission Explosion via Autonomous Review Pipelines - Preprints 

Hallucinated citations highest in social sciences preprints site - Nature 

An AI did the astrophysics. The paper got halted. – Blankline 

Major accounting firm retracts study after researchers discover AI hallucinations - Financial Times

The uncritical adoption of AI in science is alarming — we urgently need guard rails - Nature

AI-generated research papers are overwhelming peer review – The Verge

25 research papers from one university in India retracted in 5 years amid integrity and AI concerns – India Today

20 Recent Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

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Research integrity is locked into an arms race with agentic AI slop – LSE  

AI can help with research, but humans must remain accountable say university executives – Times Higher Ed 

Hallucinated citations produced by generative artificial intelligence may constitute research misconduct when citations function as data in scholarly papers – Taylor & Francis

AI tool flags plagiarism in 95% of Ph.D. theses submitted this year at India university. – Times of India 

How AI use in scholarly publishing threatens research integrity, lessens trust, and invites misinformation – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Hallucinated References: Five Excuses for Academic Misconduct – Dorethea Baur

Ministers urged not to allow data mining of academic literature – Research Professional News

Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal – Retraction Watch 

AI is inventing academic articles – and scholars are citing them – the Observer  

DataSeer develops AI system to track dataset reuse – Research Information  

Journal Submissions Riddled With AI-Created Fake Citations – Inside Higher Ed

Account for AI in the environmental footprint of scientific publishing – Nature  

Will AI Help or Hinder Scientific Publishing? – Undark

Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud. – Nature

Scientists are failing to disclose their use of AI despite journal mandates, finds study – Physics World

AI in the editorial workflow: Journals set the rules, institutions set the habits – Scholarly Futures  

AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture - Nature

What happens when reviewers receive AI feedback in their reviews? – ArXiv

Human versus artificial intelligence: investigating ability of young academics from research and non-research institutions to identify ChatGPT-generated dental research abstracts - Nature 

Fear of stigma blamed as 0.1 per cent of papers declare AI use - Times Higher Ed

LLMs & Retracted Research Papers

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Large language models should not be used to weed out retracted literature, a study of 21 chatbots concludes. Not only were the chatbots unreliable at correctly identifying retracted papers, they spit out different results when given the same prompts. On average, the 21 chatbots correctly identified fewer than half of the retracted papers. More at Retraction Watch

An Arms Race of Research Misconduct

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Retractions are rising in medical research literature, even as more eyes examine peer-reviewed papers for accuracy. AI is powering an arms race in the world of research misconduct, making it easier for scientific fraud to occur, and for editors to identify and root out. In 2002, 1 in 5,000 papers were retracted, Oransky said. In 2023 retractions increased to 1 in 500 papers. -AAPS news magazine

16 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

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Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade

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In an attempt to test just how rigorous scientific research is, some researchers have undertaken the task of replicating research that’s been published in a whole range of fields. And as more and more of those attempted replications have come back, the results have been striking — it is not uncommon to find that many, many published studies cannot be replicated.

A decade of talking about the replication crisis hasn’t translated into a scientific process that’s much less vulnerable to it. Bad science is still frequently published, including in top journals.

Kelsey Piper writing in Vox

Verification bias

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Verification bias refers to a stubborn resistance to accepting the null hypothesis – the assumption that there is no inherent relationship between the variables being studied. The null hypothesis is the default position in experiments. This is what the researcher is attempting to eliminate through experimental investigation. For example, continuing to repeat an experiment until it “works” as desired, or excluding inconvenient cases or results may make the hypothesis immune to the facts. Verification bias amounts to the repression of negative results. 

Augustine Brannigan, The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method in Social Psychology

Solo Performance

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A mountain of studies has shown that face-to-face brainstorming and teamwork often lead to inferior decisionmaking. That’s because social dynamics lead groups astray; they coalesce around the loudest extrovert’s most confidently asserted idea, no matter how daft it might be.

What works better? “Virtual” collaboration—with team members cogitating on solutions alone, in private, before getting together to talk them over. As Susan Cain (who wrote Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) discovered, researchers have found that groups working in this fashion generate better ideas and solve problems more adroitly. To really get the best out of people, have them work alone first, then network later.

Sounds like the way people collaborate on the Internet, doesn’t it? With texting, chat, status updates, comment threads, and email, you hash over ideas and thoughts with a pause between each utterance, giving crucial time for reflection. Plus, you can do so in private.

(The) overall the irony here is pretty gorgeous. It suggests we’ve been thinking about the social web the wrong way. We generally assume that it has unleashed an unruly explosion of disclosure, a constant high school of blather. But what it has really done is made our culture more introverted—and productively so. Now if we could just get some doors on those cubicles.

Clive Thompson writing in Wired Magazine