NYT The rise of artificial intelligence has produced serial writers to science and medical journals, most likely using chatbots to boost the number of citations they’ve published. Letters to the editor from writers using chatbots are flooding the world’s scientific journals, according to new research and journal editors.
The practice is putting at risk a part of scientific publishing that editors say is needed to sharpen research findings and create new directions for inquiry.
A new study on the problem started with a tropical disease specialist who had a weird experience with a chatbot-written letter. He decided to figure out just what was going on and who was submitting all those letters.
The scientist, Dr. Carlos Chaccour, at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra in Spain, said his probing began just after he had released a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the world’s most prestigious journals. The paper, published in July, was on controlling malaria infections with ivermectin, and it appeared with a laudatory editorial.