A Rapid Investigation of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content Footprints in Scholarly Publications

Gengyan Tang · Sarah Elaine Eaton

19 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Scholarly Publishing

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Academic integrity and plagiarism Publishing and Scholarly Communication Academic Writing and Publishing

Abstract

Abstract This study reports on a novel phenomenon observed in scholarly publications. Some research articles unrelated to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) generate content (AIGC contain confusing phrases such as “As an AI language model...”. We conceptualize this phenomenon as “AIGC footprints”. To provide early evidence, we conducted a small-scale sample investigation by collecting 25 articles. We found that the appearance of AIGC footprints corresponds to the time when the public version of ChatGPT was launched. These 25 articles were published by authors from countries in Central Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Among these authors, there were assistant professors (n = 5), Ph.D. researcher (n = 6), as well as Ph.D. and master’s students (n = 3). Single authors (n = 16) and single affiliations (n = 23) were more common. Analysis of the article content revealed that some authors utilized ChatGPT for literature reviews (n = 11) or idea generation (n = 11). Articles with AIGC footprints are widely distributed across various professional fields, such as Communication and Media Studies (n = 3), Cybersecurity (n = 2), Civil Engineering (n = 2), and Agricultural Technology (n = 2). The 25 articles with AIGC footprints were published in 18 different academic journals. Most of the academic journals did not disclose their APCs on their websites (n = 11), nor were they indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, and DOAJ (n = 17). The emergence of AIGC footprints reflects the potential challenges faced by scholarly publishing and higher education in ensuring quality assurance, as well as indicating potential problems in research integrity. We provide several recommendations, including the development of best research practice guidelines in the context of AIGC, integrating transparent use of AIGC into higher education instruction, and fostering ethical leadership.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

References

2023ChatGPT is fun, but not an author 2023ChatGPT and a new academic reality: Artificial Intelligence‐written research papers and the ethics of the large language models in scholarly publishing 2023Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use 2023The role of ChatGPT in scientific communication: writing better scientific review articles.2023Using AI to write scholarly publications 2023The ethics of disclosing the use of artificial intelligence tools in writing scholarly manuscripts 2023Is using ChatGPT cheating, plagiarism, both, neither, or forward thinking?2016Study of Predatory Open Access Nursing Journals

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.