ChatGPT in Scientific Writing: A Cautionary Tale
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There is a lack of an interdisciplinary perspective on citations and references generated by LLMs.
“Although prior works are quite informative [9-12], there is a lack of an interdisciplinary perspective on citations and references generated by LLMs, which is vital for understanding how LLMs perform across different disciplines.”
From Evaluation of Large Language Model Performance and Reliability for Citations and References in Scholarly Writing: Cross-Disciplinary Study (2024) · cites this paper as [11]
LLMs are infamous for making up references, providing inaccurate summaries, and making false claims that sound authoritative and convincing.
“LLMs are infamous for making up references (10), providing inaccurate summaries (35, 36), and making false claims that sound authoritative and convincing (8, 11, 12, 37).”
From Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary (2025) · cites this paper as [37]
The content generated by LLMs can contain errors or fabricated information, presenting a potential threat to the integrity of scientific publishing.
“The content generated by LLMs can contain errors or fabricated information, presenting a potential threat to the integrity of scientific publishing (13).”
From How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science? (2025) · cites this paper as [13]
LLMs are already starting to permeate the academic landscape.
“Finding answers to this question is urgent as LLMs are already starting to permeate the academic landscape (10–17).”
From How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science? (2025) · cites this paper as [13]
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Cites
Simplified calculation of body surface area
(1987) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm198710223171717 · Cited by 3,238 · see citing works
ChatGPT is fun, but not an author
Thorp, H. H. (2023) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.adg7879 · Cited by 1,437 · see citing works
Gao, C. A., Howard, F. M., Markov, N. S., Dyer, E. C., Ramesh, S., Luo, Y., & Pearson, A. T. (2022) · doi:10.1101/2022.12.23.521610 · Cited by 1,099 · see citing works
ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove
Stokel-Walker, C. (2023) · Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00107-z · Cited by 868 · see citing works
Generating scholarly content with ChatGPT: Ethical challenges for medical publishing
Liebrenz, M., Schleifer, R., Buadze, A., Bhugra, D., & Smith, A. (2023) · The Lancet Digital Health · doi:10.1016/s2589-7500(23)00019-5 · Cited by 594 · see citing works
ChatGPT and the future of medical writing
Biswas, S. (2023) · Radiology · doi:10.1148/radiol.223312 · Cited by 571 · see citing works
Body surface area: Du Bois and Du Bois revisited
Shuter, B., & Aslani, A. (2000) · European Journal of Applied Physiology · doi:10.1007/s004210050679 · Cited by 136 · see citing works
It Is Time to Abandon the Use of Body Surface Area Derived From a 100-Year-Old Formula
Zheng, H. (2022) · The American Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.amjmed.2022.03.035 · Cited by 11 · see citing works
Self-citation
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Imran, M., & Almusharraf, N. (2023) · Contemporary Educational Technology · doi:10.30935/cedtech/13605 · Cited by 421 · see citing works
Chelli, M., Descamps, J., Lavoué, V., Trojani, C., Azar, M., Deckert, M., Raynier, J.-L., Clowez, G., Boileau, P., & Ruetsch-Chelli, C. (2024) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/53164 · Cited by 413 · see citing works
Using ChatGPT in academic writing is (not) a form of plagiarism: What does the literature say?
Jarrah, A. M., Wardat, Y., & Fidalgo, P. (2023) · Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies · doi:10.30935/ojcmt/13572 · Cited by 220 · see citing works
Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary
Kobak, D., González-Márquez, R., Horvát, E.-Á., & Lause, J. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.07016 · Cited by 214
Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary
Kobak, D., González-Márquez, R., Horvát, E.-Á., & Lause, J. (2025) · Science Advances · doi:10.1126/sciadv.adt3813 · Cited by 213 · see citing works
“…LLMs are infamous for making up references (Walters and Wilder, 2023), providing inaccurate summaries (Tang et al., 2024a; Kim et al., 2024), and making false claims that sound authoritative and convincing (Mittelstadt et al., 2023; Ji et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023; Zheng and Zhan, 2023).”
Hirosawa, T., Kawamura, R., Harada, Y., Mizuta, K., Tokumasu, K., Kaji, Y., Suzuki, T., & Shimizu, T. (2023) · JMIR Medical Informatics · doi:10.2196/48808 · Cited by 130 · see citing works
Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality
Dziri, N., Lu, X., Sclar, M., Li, X. (., Jiang, L., Lin, B. Y., Welleck, S., West, P., Bhagavatula, C., Bras, R. L., et al. (2023) · Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 · doi:10.52202/075280-3081 · Cited by 124 · see citing works
“Reasoning abilities in Transformer LLMs Recently, Transformers [9, 42, 41, 14, 13, 46, 56, 57] have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities across a wide range of tasks, even outperforming humans in certain cases [61, 25, 12, 66].”
BackgroundFaith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality
Dziri, N., Lu, X., Sclar, M., Li, X. L., Jiang, L., Lin, B. Y., West, P., Bhagavatula, C., Bras, R. L., Hwang, J. D., et al. (2023) · arXiv · Cited by 124 · see citing works
Mugaanyi, J., Cai, L., Cheng, S., Lu, C., & Huang, J. (2024) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/52935 · Cited by 74 · see citing works
How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science?
Binz, M., Alaniz, S., Roskies, A., Aczel, B., Bergstrom, C. T., Allen, C., Schad, D., Wulff, D., West, J. D., Zhang, Q., et al. (2025) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2401227121 · Cited by 74 · see citing works
Slamet, J. (2024) · Discover Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1007/s44163-024-00143-2 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
ChatGPT applications in Academic Research: A Review of Benefits, Concerns, and Recommendations
AlZaabi, A., ALAmri, A., Albalushi, H., Aljabri, R., & AalAbdulsalam, A. (2023) · doi:10.1101/2023.08.17.553688 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
Shen, Y., & Chen, L. (2026) · Computer Assisted Language Learning · doi:10.1080/09588221.2025.2479141 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Yin, S., Huang, S., Xue, P., Xu, Z., Lian, Z., Ye, C., Ma, S., Liu, M., Hu, Y., Lu, P., et al. (2025) · BMC Medicine · doi:10.1186/s12916-025-03899-1 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
- Authors
- Zheng, H., & Zhan, H.
- Affiliations
- St. Francis Hospital (US)
- Stony Brook School (US)
- Corresponding author
- Zheng, Haoyi
- Venue
- The American Journal of Medicine
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2023-08
- Volume
- 136
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 725-726.e6
- ISSN
- 0002-9343 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4323657833
- Cited by
- 104
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 38 · 2023: 40
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- The American Journal of Medicine (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Keywords
- ChatGPT, large language models, scientific writing, AI-generated text, scholarly publishing, research integrity, artificial intelligence in healthcare
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