“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.

A study published on July, 2025 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.

Researchers are evaluated primarily on the number of papers they publish and the prestige of the journals in which those papers appear. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, was drafted in 2012 by a group of journal editors and publishers at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual meeting. Now it is an independent worldwide initiative. It calls on universities, funders, and publishers to stop using publication volume and journal prestige as proxies for research quality. More than 25,000 institutions and researchers around the world have signed it.
 

Source https://cen.acs.org/policy/publishing/ai-fraud-science-journal-generative-ai/104/web/2026/07

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