# Most biomedical publications show signs of LLM-assisted writing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Monitoring AI-Modified Content at Scale: A Case Study on the Impact of ChatGPT on AI Conference Peer Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07183/) (2024)
- [Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01268/) (2024)
- [Testing of Detection Tools for AI-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15666/) (2023)
- [Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07016/) (2024)
- [LLMs as Research Tools: A Large Scale Survey of Researchers' Usage and Perceptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05025/) (2024)
- [The Homogenizing Effect of Large Language Models on Human Expression and Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01491/) (2025)
- [ChatGPT "contamination": estimating the prevalence of LLMs in the scholarly literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16887/) (2024)
- [Is ChatGPT Transforming Academics' Writing Style?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08627/) (2024)
- [Human-LLM Coevolution: Evidence from Academic Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09606/) (2025)
- [Towards the relationship between AIGC in manuscript writing and author profiles: evidence from preprints in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15799/) (2024)
- [How much are LLMs changing the language of academic papers after ChatGPT? A multi-database and full text analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09596/) (2025)
- [Delving into the Utilisation of ChatGPT in Scientific Publications in Astronomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17324/) (2024)
- [LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07723/) (2026)
- [Where there's a will there's a way: ChatGPT is used more for science in countries where it is prohibited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11583/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Robustness of LLM-Synthetic Text Detectors for Academic Writing: A Comprehensive Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08046/) (2024)
- [Detecting LLM-assisted writing in scientific communication: Are we there yet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16807/) (2024)
- [Estimating the prevalence of LLM-assisted text in scholarly writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01560/) (2025)
- [Quantitative Analysis of AI-Generated Texts in Academic Research: A Study of AI Presence in Arxiv Submissions using AI Detection Tool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13812/) (2024)
- [Does GenAI Rewrite How We Write? An Empirical Study on Two-Million Preprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17882/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [An LLM-Associated Register Shift in Korean Journal Abstracts: A Morphology-Aware Excess-Vocabulary Study, 2018-2026](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07447/) (2026)
- [Biomedical Reference Generation Remains Unreliable across 26 Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14988/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Over the past several years, LLM-powered chatbots and agents have become widely used as a tool for academic writing. LLM-assisted writing can be valuable by removing language barriers but at the same time causes concerns about misconduct and fraud. To inform policy decisions, it is necessary to monitor the prevalence of LLM-altered texts in scholarly publications. Despite some recent progress in this direction, no existing method can produce reliable estimates. Here we suggest and validate a new unbiased approach to estimate LLM usage in a corpus of texts based on changing word frequencies. We apply our method to the full texts of open-access biomedical papers from Pubmed Central, and show that by the end of 2025, 89% of papers show excess of LLM-associated vocabulary. We also find that LLMs are twice as likely to be used when writing a paragraph in the Discussion section (68%) compared to a paragraph in the Methods section (32%), but even inside the Methods section, the overall prevalence of LLM usage is over 50%. We believe that our estimates are crucial to shape future guidelines and policies.