Étiquette : Scholarly Publishing

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Can ChatGPT write better scientific titles? A comparative evaluation of human-written and AI-generated titles

Authors : Paul Sebo, Bing Nie, Ting Wang

Background

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 are increasingly used in scientific writing, yet little is known about how AI-generated scientific titles are perceived by researchers in terms of quality.

Objective

To compare the perceived alignment with the abstract content (as a surrogate for perceived accuracy), appeal, and overall preference for AI-generated versus human-written scientific titles.

Methods

We conducted a blinded comparative study with 21 researchers from diverse academic backgrounds. A random sample of 50 original titles was selected from 10 high-impact general internal medicine journals. For each title, an alternative version was generated using GPT-4.0. Each rater evaluated 50 pairs of titles, each pair consisting of one original and one AI-generated version, without knowing the source of the titles or the purpose of the study.

For each pair, raters independently assessed both titles on perceived alignment with the abstract content and appeal, and indicated their overall preference. We analyzed alignment and appeal using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and mixed-effects ordinal logistic regressions, preferences using McNemar’s test and mixed-effects logistic regression, and inter-rater agreement with Gwet’s AC.
Results

AI-generated titles received significantly higher ratings for both perceived alignment with the abstract content (mean 7.9 vs. 6.7, p-value <0.001) and appeal (mean 7.1 vs. 6.7, p-value <0.001) than human-written titles. The odds of preferring an AI-generated title were 1.7 times higher (p-value =0.001), with 61.8% of 1,049 paired judgments favoring the AI version. Inter-rater agreement was moderate to substantial (Gwet’s AC: 0.54–0.70).

Conclusions

AI-generated titles were rated more favorably than human-written titles within the context of this study in terms of perceived alignment with the abstract content, appeal, and preference, suggesting that LLMs may enhance the effectiveness of scientific communication. These findings support the responsible integration of AI tools in research.

URL : Can ChatGPT write better scientific titles? A comparative evaluation of human-written and AI-generated titles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.173647.2

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Artificial intelligence in academic practices and policy discourses across ‘Big 5’ publishers

Authors :  Gergely Ferenc Lendvai, Aczél Petra

The present study investigates how the five largest academic publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE) are responding to the epistemic and procedural challenges posed by generative AI through formal policy frameworks.

Situated within ongoing debates about the boundaries of authorship and the governance of AI-generated content, our research aims to critically assess the discursive and regulatory contours of publishers’ authorship guidelines (PGs).

We employed a multi-method design that combines qualitative coding, semantic network analysis, and comparative matrix visualization to examine the official policy texts collected from each publisher’s website. Findings reveal a foundational consensus across all five publishers in prohibiting AI systems from being credited as authors and in mandating disclosure of AI usage.

However, beyond this shared baseline, marked divergences emerge in the scope, specificity, and normative framing of AI policies. Co-occurrence and semantic analyses underline the centrality of ‘authorship’, ‘ethics’, and ‘accountability’ in AI discourse. Structural similarity measures further reveal alignment among Wiley, Elsevier, and Taylor & Francis, with Springer as a clear outlier.

Our results point to an unsettled regulatory landscape where policies serve not only as instruments of governance but also as performative assertions of institutional identity and legitimacy.

Consequently, the fragmented field of PG highlights the need for harmonized, inclusive, and enforceable frameworks that recognize both the potential and risks of AI in scholarly communication.

URL : Artificial intelligence in academic practices and policy discourses across ‘Big 5’ publishers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvag004

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How multilingual is scholarly communication? Mapping the global distribution of languages in publications and citations

Authors : Carolina Pradier, Lucía Céspedes, Vincent Larivière

Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English. Studies have examined scientists’ linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global analysis of multilingualism in science.

Using two major bibliometric databases (OpenAlex and Dimensions), we provide a large-scale analysis of linguistic diversity in science, considering both the language of publications (N = 87,577,942) and of cited references (N = 1,480,570,087).

For the 1990–2023 period, we find that only Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish have expanded at a faster pace than English. Country-level analyses show that this trend is due to the growing strength of the Latin American and Indonesian academic circuits. Our results also confirm the same-language preference phenomenon (particularly for languages other than English), the strong connection between multilingualism and bibliodiversity, and that social sciences and humanities are the least English-dominated fields.

Our findings suggest that policies recognizing the value of both national-language and English-language publications have had a concrete impact on the distribution of languages in the global field of scholarly communication.

URL : How multilingual is scholarly communication? Mapping the global distribution of languages in publications and citations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.70055

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Pursuing transparency: How research performing organizations in Germany collect data on publication costs

Authors : Dorothea Strecker, Heinz Pampel, Jonas Höfting

This article presents the results of a survey conducted in 2024 among research performing organizations (RPOs) in Germany on how they collect data on publication costs. Of the 583 invitees, 258 (44.3%) completed the questionnaire.

This survey is the first comprehensive study on the recording of publication costs at RPOs in Germany.

The results show that the majority of surveyed RPOs recorded publication costs at least in part. However, procedures in this regard were often non-binding. Respondents’ ratings of the reliability of the collection of data on publication costs varied by the source of publication funding.

Eighty percent of respondents rated the contribution of collecting data on publication costs to shaping the open access transformation as « very important » or « important. » Yet, these data were used as a basis for strategic decisions in only 59% of the surveyed RPOs.

Moreover, most respondents considered the implementation of an information budget at their institutions by 2025 unlikely. We discuss the implications of these findings for the open access transformation.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08340

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The Drain of Scientific Publishing

Authors : Fernanda Beigel, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto, Gemma Derrick, Aileen Fyfe, Pablo Gomez Barreiro, Mark A. Hanson, Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière, Christine Noe, Stephen Pinfield, James Wilsdon

The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science.

We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.04820

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The Modal Mode of Thinking about Scholarly Publishing

Author : Jefferson Pooley

The essay argues that the study of scholarly communication would benefit from attending to a “modal” sensibility—that is, a self-conscious sensitivity to the differences that different mediums make in understanding published works of scholarship.

The essay critiques the unreflective textualism that dominates the conversation on publishing. The claim is that the primacy of text, as the sovereign medium of academic communication, is a largely invisible parochialism.

The essay points to examples and traditions of multi-modal publishing as an entry point to taking the medium-specificity of publishing formats as an object of analysis. Such experimentation has followed, sometimes closely, the emergence of new mediums of storage and transmission within the societies that scholars work.

The mid-twentieth century birth of the modern medium concept made multi-modality a conceivable, self-conscious project. Even so, the discourse on academic publishing has rarely registered the implications, including for inherited text-based formats.

The essay concludes with a call for media scholars, curiously underrepresented in the discourse, to take up this task, with reference to pioneering works in the field.

URL : The Modal Mode of Thinking about Scholarly Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.8757

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Why the Current Model oAcademic Publishing Is Ethically Flawed—and What We Can Do to Change It

Author : Emilia Kaczmarek

This article offers a reasoned call for urgent reform of the academic journal publishing system. It focuses on the ethical flaws of the current for-profit model. This model enables the transfer of public funds into the profit margins of private companies that add no meaningful value to research and even limit access to knowledge.

The article describes how feedback loops in metrics used in the evaluation of scientific publishing exacerbate structural inequalities and make it difficult to break out of the system. Moreover, the opportunity for easy profit attracts dishonest actors and fuels the rise of predatory journals, which in turn corrodes public trust in science.

Without systemic reforms, the current system could also undermine artificial intelligence–driven research outcomes by enabling models to be trained on a growing number of substandard scientific publications. The article concludes with ten specific proposals for action, aimed at stimulating further discussion within and beyond academia.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp-2025-0047