‘As of my last knowledge update’: How is content generated by ChatGPT infiltrating scientific papers published in premier journals?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight the situation whereby content generated by the large language model ChatGPT is appearing in peer-reviewed papers in journals by recognized publishers. The paper demonstrates how to identify sections that indicate that a text fragment was generated, that is, entirely created, by ChatGPT. To prepare an illustrative compilation of papers that appear in journals indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases and possessing Impact Factor and CiteScore indicators, the SPAR4SLR method was used, which is mainly applied in systematic literature reviews. Three main findings are presented: in highly regarded premier journals, articles appear that bear the hallmarks of the content generated by AI large language models, whose use was not declared by the authors (1); many of these identified papers are already receiving citations from other scientific works, also placed in journals found in scientific databases (2); and, most of the identified papers belong to the disciplines of medicine and computer science, but there are also articles that belong to disciplines such as environmental science, engineering, sociology, education, economics and management (3). This paper aims to continue and add to the recently initiated discussion on the use of large language models like ChatGPT in the creation of scholarly works.