Rise of AI-generated open-access review articles after ChatGPT: A case example in inflammatory bowel disease

Abstract

Biomedical review articles are important for education, evidence synthesis, and clinical decision-making. Large language models such as ChatGPT may contribute to a surge in the number of AI-written reviews, raising concerns about the quality and reliability of scientific content. We searched PubMed for open-access reviews in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) published before ChatGPT (period 1), during the first year after ChatGPT's release (period 2, 2023-2024), and the year after (period 3, 2024-2025), and randomly selected 60 articles for analysis from each period. Using an AI text detector, no articles were identified as AI-written in period 1, versus 1.7% and 6.7% in periods 2 and 3, respectively. None of the potentially AI-written articles disclosed AI use. None of them had an IBD expert as the first author; only one article from period 2 and one from period 3 had an IBD expert among the authors. While the absolute number of AI-written reviews remains relatively low at present, the growing trend is a cause for concern regarding the potential decline of the quality and trustworthiness of biomedical review articles. Safeguards should be established to maintain the values of review articles.

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