Our findings suggest that AI tools are not yet ready to take on the task of editing academic papers without extensive human intervention to generate useful prompts, evaluate the output, and manage the practicalities. - Science Editor

If AI-generated papers flood the scientific literature, future AI systems may be trained on AI output and undergo model collapse. This means they may become increasingly ineffectual at innovating. - The Conversation

In a set of 300 fake and real scientific papers, the AI-based tool, named 'xFakeSci', detected up to 94 per cent of the fake ones. - Deccan Herald

People will say, I have 100 ideas that I don’t have time for. Get the AI Scientist to do those. - Nature

There are signs that AI evaluations of academic papers could be corrupting the integrity of knowledge production. Up to 17 percent of reviews submitted to prestigious AI conferences in the last year were substantially written by large language models (LLMs), a recent study estimated. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add udm=14 to the search URL. - Tedium

It’s possible to switch back to an AI-free search experience. Google has added a new Web tab to its search engine page at the same time as introducing these new AI features. You can configure this kind of web search as the default. - PopSci

In a 2023 Nature survey of more than 1,600 scientists, almost 30% said that they had used generative AI tools to help write (academic) manuscripts. - Nature

The highest-profile research is heavily influenced by cultural forces and career incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth. To get your research published in high-impact journals it helps enormously not to challenge the predominant narrative. Scientific narratives can become entrenched and self-reinforcing. And that’s where we are in climate science. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

How big is science’s fake-paper problem? An unpublished analysis shared with Nature suggests that over the past two decades, more than 400,000 research articles have been published that show strong textual similarities to known studies produced by paper mills. - Nature

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the country's top science institute, on Tuesday published new guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific research, as part of its efforts to improve scientific integrity and reduce research misconduct, such as data fabrication and plagiarism. - Global Times

September 24, 2024

18 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

September 24, 2024/ Stephen Goforth

Do AI models produce more original ideas than researchers? - Nature

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats: A Comprehensive SWOT Analysis of AI and Human Expertise in Peer Review – Scholarly Kitchen

How Are AI Chatbots Changing Scientific Publishing? – Science Friday

New academic AI guidelines aim to curb research misconduct – Global Times

Generative AI-assisted Peer Review in Medical Publications: Opportunities Or Trap – JRIM Publications

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: preempting evidence manipulation – Harvard

AI Editing: Are We There Yet? - Science Editor – Science Editor

AI tool claims 94% accuracy in telling apart fake from real research papers – Deccan Herald

AI firms must play fair when they use academic data in training – Nature

AI Scientists Have a Problem: AI Bots Are Reviewing Their Work ChatGPT – Chronicle of Higher Ed

A list of more than 500 papers with clear evidence of generative AI use - Academ-AI

Is AI my co-author? The ethics of using artificial intelligence in scientific publishing – Taylor & Francis Online

Is ChatGPT a Reliable Ghostwriter? – The Journal of Nuclear Medicine

A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem – The Conversation

Could science be fully automated? A team of machine-learning researchers has now tried. - Nature

How AI tools help students—and their professors—in academic research – Fast Company

AI-Generated Junk Science Research a Growing Problem, Experts Say – PYMNTS

Did a criminal Russian academic paper mill use AI to plagiarize a BYU professor and his student? – Deseret News

August 21, 2024

22 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

August 21, 2024/ Stephen Goforth

AI tools for researchers: Key insights for librarians to enhance academic support – Springer Nature

OpenResearcher: An Open-Source Project that Harnesses AI to Accelerate Scientific Research – Marktechpost

Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly - Nature

Flood Of 'Junk': How AI Is Changing Scientific Publishing - Barrons

How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? - Modern Language Association

AI scientists are producing a host of new theories of how our brains learn – The Economist

Should scientists be paid when AI chatbots use their work? – Chemistry World

Artificial intelligence in scientific medical writing: Legitimate and deceptive uses and ethical concerns – Science Direct

Revisiting the ‘Research Parasite’ Debate in the Age of AI – Undark

AI is complicating plagiarism. How should scientists respond? – Nature

Woefully Insufficient Publisher Policies on Author AI Use Put Research Integrity at Risk – Scholarly Kitchen

Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI – The Bookseller

Research findings strongly argue against the use of free AI detectors to detect fake scientific images - arXiv

Another paper with an anatomically incorrect image has been retracted – Retraction Watch

Universities Don’t Want AI Research to Leave Them Behind – Wall Street Journal

AI Finds That AI Is Great In New Garbage Research From Tony Blair Institute – 404 Media

Delving into ChatGPT usage in academic writing through excess vocabulary - arXiv

AI threatens scientific research with fake papers – The Saturday Paper

The role of ChatGPT in developing systematic literature searches: an evidence summary - Journal of the European Association for Health Information and Libraries

A Look Under the Hood of Scopus AI: Elsevier’s search tool for scholarly testing – Scholarly Kitchen

How to cite ChatGPT in APA Style – American Psychological Association

10 Best AI Tools for Research – BeeBom

June 18, 2024

15 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

June 18, 2024/ Stephen Goforth

The advent of human-assisted peer review by AI – Nature

The Impact of AI on Academic Research and Publishing – Arxiv

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

Fake science in fraudulent papers is on the rise - The Week

Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures – Wall Street Journal

Researchers warned against using AI to peer review academic papers – Semafor

Guidelines for academics aim to lessen ethical pitfalls in generative-AI use – Nature

Artificial intelligence content detection in ASCO scientific abstracts from 2021 to 2023 - Journal of Clinical Oncology

Software that detects ‘tortured acronyms’ in research papers could help root out misconduct | Science - AAAS

Guidance needed for using artificial intelligence to screen journal submissions for misconduct – Sage

Academic Writers on AI: An Oxford University Press Study – Publishing Perspectives

Report: Most researchers use AI tools despite distrusting it – Inside Higher Ed

With hallucinations waning, AI is diving deeper into scientific research – The Next Web

Fake Scientific Studies Are a Problem That’s Getting Harder to Solve – Bloomberg

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems – The Register

May 06, 2024

A Dozen Quotes about AI & Academic Scholarship

May 06, 2024/ Stephen Goforth

AI chatbots have thoroughly infiltrated scientific publishing. One percent of scientific articles published in 2023 showed signs of generative AI’s potential involvement, according to a recent analysis - Scientific American

The journey from research data generation to manuscript publication presents many opportunities where AI could, hypothetically, be used – for better or for worse. - Technology Network

Is ChatGPT corrupting peer review? There are telltale words that hint at AI use. A study of review reports identifies dozens of adjectives that could indicate text written with the help of chatbots. - Nature

Should researchers use AI to write papers? This group aims to release a set of guidelines by August, which will be updated every year - Science.org

Generative AI firms should stop ripping off publishers and instead work with them to enrich scholarship, says Oxford University Press’ David Clark. - Times Higher Ed

Here are three ways ChatGPT helps me in my academic writing. Generative AI can be a valuable aid in writing, editing and peer review – if you use it responsibly - Nature

New detection tools powered by AI have lifted the lid on what some are calling an epidemic of fraud in medical research and publishing. Last year, the number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. - DW News (video)

Estimating the prevalence of ChatGPT "contamination” in the scholarly literature: It is estimated that at least 60,000 papers (slightly over 1% of all articles) were LLM-assisted - ArXiiv

AI-Generated Texts from LLM has infiltrated the realm of scientific writing? We confirmed and quantified the widespread influence of AI-generated texts in scientific publications across many scientific domains - BioRxiv

Georgetown found that American scholarly institutions and companies are the biggest contributors to AI safety research, but it pales in comparison to the amount of overall studies into AI, raising questions about public and private sector priorities. - Semafor

Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history. - 404Media

The Association of Research Libraries announced a set of seven guiding principles for university librarians to follow in light of rising generative AI use. - Inside Higher Ed

March 26, 2024

13 Articles about the Impact of AI on Scholarly Research

March 26, 2024/ Stephen Goforth

Is AI ready to mass-produce lay summaries of research articles? – Nature

The Latest “Crisis” — Is the Research Literature Overrun with ChatGPT- and LLM-generated Articles? – Scholarly Kitchen

Monitoring AI-Modified Content at Scale: A Case Study on the Impact of ChatGPT on AI Conference Peer Reviews - Arxiv

Peer Review and Scientific Publishing Are Faltering – Medscape

Silicon Valley is pricing academics out of AI research - The Washington Post

Generative artificial intelligence and scientific publishing: urgent questions, difficult answers – The Lancet

Is ChatGPT making scientists hyper-productive? The highs and lows of using AI – Nature

Authorship and ChatGPT: a Conservative View – Springer

AI-generated images and video are here: how could they shape research? – Nature

Fake academic papers are on the rise: why they’re a danger and how to stop them – The Conversation

Paul M. Sutter Thinks We’re Doing Science (and Journalism) Wrong – Undark

More published research should be debunked and retracted, watchdogs say – Wisconsin Public Radio

How Science Sleuths Track Down Bad Research – Wall Street Journal

February 26, 2024

18 Articles about AI & Academic Research

February 26, 2024/ Stephen Goforth

Could AI Disrupt Peer Review? Publishers’ policies lag technological advances - Spectrum

The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Writing Scientific Review Articles - Springer

‘Obviously ChatGPT’ — how reviewers accused me of scientific fraud - Nature

AI could accelerate scientific fraud as well as progress - Economist

Researchers plan to release guidelines for the use of AI in publishing - Chemical & Engineering News

ChatGPT use shows that the grant-application system is broken - Nature

Detecting fraud in scientific publications: the perils and promise of AI - Science Pod

The Science family of journals is adopting the use of Proofig, an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered image-analysis tool- Science Magazine

Can ChatGPT and Other AI Bots Serve as Peer Reviewers? - ACS Publishing

AI Use in Manuscript Preparation for Academic Journals - Cornell University

As scientists face a flood of papers, AI developers aim to help New tools show promise, but technical and legal barriers may hinder widespread use - Science Magazine

Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science? – Nature

Affiliation Bias in Peer Review of Abstracts by a Large Language Mode - JAMA

AI copilots and robo-labs turbocharge research - Axios

Editing companies are stealing unpublished research to train their AI - Times Higher Ed

How journals are fighting back against a wave of questionable images - Nature

Can ChatGPT evaluate research quality? - Cornell University

The JSTOR Daily Sleuth - Jstor

November 20, 2023

10 Articles about AI & Academic Research

November 20, 2023/ Stephen Goforth

Generative AI – the latest scapegoat for research assessment – London School of Economics

How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishing – Nature

Editors’ Statement on the Responsible Use of Generative AI Technologies in Scholarly Journal – Wiley Online

Scientists prefer feedback from ChatGPT to judgement by peers – New Scientist

Will ChatGPT Transform Research? It Already Has, Say Nobelists – Inside Higher Ed

‘We’re All Using It’: Publishing Decisions Are Increasingly Aided by AI. That’s Not Always Obvious. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

A machine-learning tool can easily spot when chemistry papers are written using the chatbot ChatGPT – Nature

Who Published It? – Asian Scientist

Transparency in research: An analysis of ChatGPT usage acknowledgment by authors across disciplines and geographies - Taylor & Francis Online

Science journals overturn ban on ChatGPT-authored papers – Times Higher Ed

October 10, 2023

9 articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

October 10, 2023/ Stephen Goforth

AI beats human sleuth at finding problematic images in research papers – Nature

Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting - Retraction Watch

Spitting out the AI Gobbledegook sandwich: a suggestion for publishers - Dorothy V. M. Bishop blog

AI destroys principles of authorship. A scary case from educational technology publishing. - Marco Kalz blog

Artificial Intelligence–Generated Research in the Literature: Is It Real or Is It Fraud? - Mary Ann Liebert Publishers

ChatGPT used in peer reviews of Australian Research Council grant applications – itnews

As scientists explore AI-written text, journals hammer out policies – Science.org

Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals—and It’s Proving Difficult to Detect – Wired

Draft law in China sets out penalties for AI-aided academic writing – University World News

October 25, 2022

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

October 25, 2022/ Stephen Goforth

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

August 09, 2022

Tuesday Tech Tools: 20 Research Tools

August 09, 2022/ Stephen Goforth

Academic OneFile
This Cengage database, often available through public libraries, has access to thousands of journals. Not all articles are available in full text. Subscription required.

Academic Search Premier*
This database provides access to the latest research published in thousands of scholarly journals. Subscription required.

Brookings
A non-profit think tank, Brookings has a large network of scholars who produce reports and papers on a wide variety of important news topics.

Comparea
See a visual comparison of two states, cities, countries or continents. Move them around. It will also tell how many times bigger a geographic area is to another.

Connected Papers
A visual literature-mapping and recommendation tool that finds publicly available scholarly papers. Around 200 million articles, including preprints. The articlle alert system builds a list of recommended papers that users can train by liking or disliking the articles.

Contact Out
A plugin that surfaces email addresses and phone numbers for LinkedIn users. Free plan allows 100 search credits. Paid plans starting from $19 a month.

Content Gems
Monitor blogs, social media, etc Filter content based on keywords. Dends you links. Limited free account or paid accounts (starting at $10) based on the number of researched keywords.

Data.gov
US government data sets.

Directory of Open Access Journals
A growing database that covers only journals that are free and open to the public.

Directory of Open Access Repositories
This free site is operated by the University of Nottingham in the UK. It aggregates databases from around the world, locating open access research across disciplines.

Fact Check
A political fact checking site run by The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Feedly
Web-based and largest RSS feed. Subscribe to get new posts from a site. Uses upvotes and downvotes to learn which new articles is most relevant to the user. Useful to academic researchers looking to stay on top of new papers but also for those who want to monitor news, RSS feeds, Reddit, Twitter and podcasts. Free, but a paid account offers more features such as the ability to follow more than 100 sources and hide adverts. $6 or more a month. Compare to Inoreader.

Google Scholar*
The dominant tool in the field of research, users can set alerts for publication of new scholarly papers on particular research topics, authors, or keywords. Sometimes picks up useful preprints, theses, and dissertations. Access to the studies could be restricted. If you can’t get a particular study itself through a university/library affiliation, be sure to click “All Versions” at the bottom of the search result. Widely acknowledged as the biggest corpus in existence, one estimate puts the volume at close to 400 million articles.

Google Trends
Real time search info that can be broken down by day or region. Pulls data from YouTube and Google News as well. Insights on what people want to know right now.

Hunter
Searches for contact information by employer. 100 searches free. Paid plans range from $49 – $399.

Open Knowledge Map
A visual-mapping tool that creates maps based on keywords to arrange 100s of scholarly papers, data sets, and software that are related into bubbles. Users can change and update them. It can group papers into themes you may not have considered to find subfields of research.

Research Rabbit
Launched in 2021, it describes itself as “Spotify for papers”. Users save relevant papers to a collection. A list of recommended articles updates based on the collection. Alerts are more personalized than Google Scholar. Free.

Research Gate
Sends email recommendations of scholarly papers and offers a feed of them. Users can also see a chronological newsfeed of papers posted by their ResearchGate contacts. Around 150 million publication pages and 20 million users. Free.

TLDR
A scientific search engine that generates one-sentence summaries of research papers.

Storyful Multisearch
Chrome browser extension that searches multiple social networking platforms at the same time. Free.

More Tech Tools

September 07, 2021

Tuesday Tech Tools: 21 Research Tools

September 07, 2021/ Stephen Goforth

Some tools that will help you with research.

Academic OneFile
This Cengage database, often available through public libraries, has access to thousands of journals. Not all articles are available in full text. Subscription required.

Academic Search Premier*
This database provides access to the latest research published in thousands of scholarly journals. Subscription required.

The Brookings Institution
A non-profit think tank, Brookings has a large network of scholars that produce reports and papers on a wide variety of important news topics.

Comparea
See a visual comparison of two states, cities, countries or continents. Move them around. It will also tell how many times bigger a geographic area is to another.

Connected Papers
A visual literature-mapping and recommendation tool that finds publicly available scholarly papers. Around 200 million articles, including preprints. The articlle alert system builds a list of recommended papers that users can train by liking or disliking the articles.

Contact Out
A plugin that surfaces email addresses and phone numbers for LinkedIn users. Free plan allows 100 search credits. Paid plans starting from $19 a month.

Content Gems
Monitors blogs, social media, etc and filters the content based on keywords, etc. and sends you links. A free account is available but limited. Paid accounts (starting at $10) are based on the number of keywords you want to research. another.

Data.gov
US government data sets.

Directory of Open Access Journals
A growing database that covers only journals that are free and open to the public.

Directory of Open Access Repositories
This free site is operated by the University of Nottingham in the UK. It aggregates databases from around the world, locating open access research across disciplines.

Fact Check
A political fact checking site run by The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Fetching
Captures every site you visit automatically, so you can more easily find websites and articles you need now but didn't know at the time you would need them.

Google Scholar*
The dominant tool in the field of research, users can set alerts for publication of new scholarly papers on particular research topics, authors, or keywords. Sometimes picks up useful preprints, theses, and dissertations. Access to the studies could be restricted. If you can’t get a particular study itself through a university/library affiliation, be sure to click “All Versions” at the bottom of the search result. Widely acknowledged as the biggest corpus in existence, one estimate puts the volume at close to 400 million articles.

Google Trends
Real time search info. Break it down by day or region. Pulls data from YouTube and Google News as well. Insights on what people want to know right now.

Hunter
Searches for contact information by employer. 100 searches free. Paid plans range from $49 – $399.

Open Knowledge Map
A visual-mapping tool that creates maps based on keywords to arrange 100s of scholarly papers, data sets, and software that are related into bubbles. Users can change and update them. It can group papers into themes you may not have considered to find subfields of research.

Research Rabbit
Launched in 2021, it describes itself as “Spotify for papers”. Users save relevant papers to a collection. A list of recommended articles updates based on the collection. Alerts are more personalized than Google Scholar. Free.

TLDR
A scientific search engine that generates one-sentence summaries of research papers.

Storyful
Find and verifies stories on social media platforms for clients. Owned by News Corps.

More tech tools

June 23, 2021

Verification bias

June 23, 2021/ Stephen Goforth

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

May 25, 2020

Solo Performance

May 25, 2020/ Stephen Goforth

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