Can we stop AI from flooding scientific journals?
“Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic,” begins a retracted paper in the Elsevier journal Surfaces and Interfaces. This is one of ChatGPT’s standard openers when responding to a user prompt. The researcher submitted the manuscript beginning with this line, and it passed peer review. No one noticed the mistake until after publication.
Publishing is crucial for many scientists’ careers, especially those in academia, and a key part of securing jobs, funding, and tenure. The pressure to publish has always led some to take shortcuts. But with generative AI, a researcher can now create a convincing manuscript in just a few hours, even adding fake data and citations. Many journals don’t have the resources or motivation to catch this. As a result, generative AI has made an existing publish-or-perish problem worse.
“AI is an accelerant, not the kindling,” says Ivan Oransky, cofounder of Retraction Watch, which tracks retractions across scientific literature. “The kindling is publish or perish.”
A study published last July examining over 15 million PubMed biomedical abstracts worldwide found that at least 13.5% of papers published in 2024 showed signs of AI assistance. The rate varied by field, journal, and country—climbing as high as 40% in certain disciplines and running higher in non-English-speaking countries.
“There are a lot of ways that AI can help out in scientific writing,” says David Resnik, a bioethicist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. It can smooth prose, improve grammar, and help non-native English speakers present work more clearly. “It can even draft sections of a paper with appropriate human oversight,” Resnik says. “But at the end of the day, the human being must be responsible, and the contribution of AI should be appropriately disclosed.”
Another study, published in August 2025, reported that the number of papers published by paper mills—organized operations that fabricate and sell fraudulent research—is doubling every 1.5 years, a rate much faster than the growth of legitimate scientific output. [Continue reading…]