{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/delving-into-chatgpt-usage-in-academic","title":"Delving into ChatGPT usage in academic writing through excess vocabulary","arxiv_id":"2406.07016","date":"2024-06-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Dmitry Kobak","Rita González-Márquez","Emőke-Ágnes Horvát","Jan Lause"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can generate and revise text with human-level performance. These models come with clear limitations: they can produce inaccurate information, reinforce existing biases, and be easily misused. Yet, many scientists use them for their scholarly writing. But how wide-spread is such LLM usage in the academic literature? To answer this question, we present an unbiased, large-scale approach: we study vocabulary changes in 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010--2024, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 10% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, reaching 30% for some sub-corpora. We show that LLMs have had an unprecedented impact on the scientific literature, surpassing the effect of major world events such as the Covid pandemic.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07016v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.07016v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"delving-into-chatgpt-usage-in-academic","repo_url":"https://github.com/berenslab/chatgpt-excess-words","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2406.07016","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}