mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

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

arXiv 2403.16887 ↗First posted 25 Mar 2024cs.DLcited by 26

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Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2024.

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 9; 2025: 14; 2026: 3.

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  1. 2024Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabularycited by 78
  2. 2025Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluationcited by 42
  3. 2024The Impact of Large Language Models in Academia: from Writing to Speakingcited by 18
  4. 2025Human-LLM Coevolution: Evidence from Academic Writingcited by 15
  5. 2025Large Means Left: Political Bias in Large Language Models Increases with Their Number of Parameterscited by 12
  6. 2025Academic journals' AI policies fail to curb the surge in AI-assisted academic writingcited by 12
  7. 2025CoDet-M4: Detecting Machine-Generated Code in Multi-Lingual, Multi-Generator and Multi-Domain Settingscited by 11
  8. 2024System 2 thinking in OpenAI's o1-preview model: Near-perfect performance on a mathematics examcited by 10
  9. 2024Are AI Detectors Good Enough? A Survey on Quality of Datasets With Machine-Generated Textscited by 10
  10. 2024Why Does ChatGPT "Delve" So Much? Exploring the Sources of Lexical Overrepresentation in Large Language Modelscited by 8
  11. 2024Delving into the Utilisation of ChatGPT in Scientific Publications in Astronomycited by 7
  12. 2025Advancing the Scientific Method with Large Language Models: From Hypothesis to Discoverycited by 7
14 more
  1. 2025Lossless Compression of Large Language Model-Generated Text via Next-Token Predictioncited by 5
  2. 2025Science Is Falling Behind the Frontier: Foundation Model Adoption Across Half a Million Paperscited by 5
  3. 2024Understanding Generative AI Content with Embedding Modelscited by 4
  4. 2025Model Misalignment and Language Change: Traces of AI-Associated Language in Unscripted Spoken Englishcited by 4
  5. 2024NLLG Quarterly arXiv Report 09/24: What are the most influential current AI Papers?cited by 3
  6. 2025Convergence Dynamics and Stabilization Strategies of Co-Evolving Generative Modelscited by 2
  7. 2025GPT Editors, Not Authors: The Stylistic Footprint of LLMs in Academic Preprintscited by 2
  8. 2025Word Overuse and Alignment in Large Language Models: The Influence of Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 2
  9. 2026PRAIB: Peer Review AI Benchmark of Behaviour of LLM-Assisted Reviewingcited by 2
  10. 2026Most biomedical publications show signs of LLM-assisted writingcited by 2
  11. 2025Detection Avoidance Techniques for Large Language Modelscited by 1
  12. 2025Does Scientific Writing Converge to U.S. English? Evidence from Generative AI-Assisted Publicationscited by 1
  13. 2024Impact of ChatGPT on the writing style of condensed matter physicistscited by 0
  14. 2026Isolating LLM Lexical Bias: A Curation-Free Triangulated Metric for Preference-Stage Learningcited by 0