Analysing the impact of ChatGPT in research

Abstract

AbstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) are a type of machine learning that handles a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) scenarios. Recently, in December 2022, a company called OpenAI released ChatGPT, a tool that, within a few months, became the most representative example of LLMs, automatically generating unique and coherent text on many topics, summarising and rewriting it, or even translating it to other languages. ChatGPT originated some controversy in academia since students can generate unique text for writing assessments being sometimes extremely difficult to distinguish whether it comes from ChatGPT or a person. In research, some journals specifically banned ChatGPT in scientific papers. However, when used correctly, it becomes a powerful tool to rewrite, for instance, scientific papers and, thus, deliver researchers’ messages in a better way. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of the impact of ChatGPT in research. We downloaded the abstract of over 45,000 papers from over 300 journals from Dec 2022 and Feb 2023 belonging to different research editorials. We use four of the most known ChatGPT detection tools and conclude that ChatGPT played a role in around 10% of the papers published in every editorial, showing that authors from different fields have rapidly adopted such a tool in their research.