Where is academic writing headed?
Bit of a long rant incoming, I'm apologizing beforehand for the absolute wall of text I'm about to type out...
I know that this is an ongoing, albeit saturated topic, but where is academic writing even headed? Particularly in STEM fields. We live in a world now where if you decide to get into academia, there is a massive push for publications. Many institutions now hold stringent publication policies for everything from grades of students to promotions of faculties. Well at least this is how it works in Asia.
In the institute from where I graduated from a few years back, there's a policy that states that Master's students must have one publication in a peer reviewed journal if they want their dissertation work to be considered even eligible for the top grade. Given that the dissertation work holds a huge weightage in terms of credits, even a single grade point difference makes a massive difference in the final GPA.
I know how my supervisor pressurised me to write a review paper so that I could get the top grade. He gave me, a completely inexperienced Master's student, a ridiculous deadline of 15 days to write a full length high quality review paper, one that's good enough to be published in an SCI indexed journal, entirely by myself. I actually took several months to submit the first draft and he decided to submit it to a lower quartile journal so that it gets accepted quickly. My paper is obviously not great but I genuinely believe it could have been published in a higher impact journal if it had been given some time. The hunt for a grade now hurts the visibility of the paper.
The paper did get accepted for peer review in the first go and after multiple rounds of peer review (basically reviewer 4 bullying me 3 times in a row y'all know how that goes), it got accepted for publication a few months before my thesis defense and I got the highly coveted top grade... Only for me to not be satisfied at all.
This is how it's running in my institute now. My juniors have taken after me and one more batchmate of mine who also published a review paper and are now in a massive rat race endlessly typing away on their laptops.
During my literature review phase I read well over 200 papers. Many of the recently published review papers I read had a lot of glaring red flags. The most concerning being mismatched references. For example, a study claimed a nanoparticle could perform an activity of a particular enzyme but the paper they had cited was about photovoltaic cells. This wasn't even a singular issue. This same problem of incorrect references was all over the paper. This was published in a Q1 journal having an impact factor of 18 something. It was published a couple or so years back and it's still sitting there. This is a typical example of blatant misuse of LLMs (where it cooks up its own claims and cites totally unrelated papers) and somehow this wasn't caught during peer review either despite the journal being "high quality".
I honestly can't blame whoever wrote it because they very well could have been under pressure from their PI or in a rat race for publications and decided to just copy paste whatever some LLM told them for the hell of it.
I even see numerous papers where the figures are very obviously generated by some LLM tool. The text seems to AI generated or polished too (although there's no real way to prove it). The telltale signs are obvious. The journal policies clearly state to disclose AI usage and some don't even allow AI generated art. I haven't found a single paper where the authors openly disclose that they used an LLM tool for writing assistance or grammar polishing. I'm pretty sure the editors and reviewers know and notice this too. Do they just not care?
So is this really where we are now? Quality of papers coming out now are on a steady decline and no one really seems to care, and even if they do, the problem is so widespread and systemic that they can't even do anything. What does this mean for the future of publication quality and academia overall? Would love to know everyone's thoughts.