{"slug": "most-biomedical-publications-show-signs-of-llm-assisted-writing", "title": "Most biomedical publications show signs of LLM-assisted writing", "summary": "A new study posted on arXiv on August 11, 2026, estimates that by the end of 2025, 89% of open-access biomedical papers in PubMed Central showed signs of LLM-assisted writing, based on an unbiased method analyzing word frequency changes. The authors found LLMs were twice as likely to be used in Discussion paragraphs (68%) than in Methods paragraphs (32%), with over 50% prevalence even in Methods. The findings aim to inform policy decisions on academic writing integrity.", "body_md": "# Computer Science > Computation and Language\n\n[Submitted on 11 Aug 2026]\n\n# Title:Most biomedical publications show signs of LLM-assisted writing\n\n[View PDF](/pdf/2608.10715)\n\n[HTML (experimental)](https://arxiv.org/html/2608.10715v1)\n\nAbstract:Over the past several years, LLM-powered chatbots and agents have become widely used as a tool for academic writing. LLM-assisted writing can be valuable by removing language barriers but at the same time causes concerns about misconduct and fraud. To inform policy decisions, it is necessary to monitor the prevalence of LLM-altered texts in scholarly publications. Despite some recent progress in this direction, no existing method can produce reliable estimates. Here we suggest and validate a new unbiased approach to estimate LLM usage in a corpus of texts based on changing word frequencies. We apply our method to the full texts of open-access biomedical papers from Pubmed Central, and show that by the end of 2025, 89% of papers show excess of LLM-associated vocabulary. We also find that LLMs are twice as likely to be used when writing a paragraph in the Discussion section (68%) compared to a paragraph in the Methods section (32%), but even inside the Methods section, the overall prevalence of LLM usage is over 50%. We believe that our estimates are crucial to shape future guidelines and policies.\n\n### Current browse context:\n\ncs.CL\n\n### References & Citations\n\nLoading...\n\n# Bibliographic and Citation Tools\n\nBibliographic Explorer\n\n*(*[What is the Explorer?](https://info.arxiv.org/labs/showcase.html#arxiv-bibliographic-explorer))\nConnected Papers\n\n*(*[What is Connected Papers?](https://www.connectedpapers.com/about))\nLitmaps\n\n*(*[What is Litmaps?](https://www.litmaps.co/))\nscite Smart Citations\n\n*(*[What are Smart Citations?](https://www.scite.ai/))# Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article\n\nalphaXiv\n\n*(*[What is alphaXiv?](https://alphaxiv.org/))\nCatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers\n\n*(*[What is CatalyzeX?](https://www.catalyzex.com))\nDagsHub\n\n*(*[What is DagsHub?](https://dagshub.com/))\nGotit.pub\n\n*(*[What is GotitPub?](http://gotit.pub/faq))\nHugging Face\n\n*(*[What is Huggingface?](https://huggingface.co/huggingface))\nScienceCast\n\n*(*[What is ScienceCast?](https://sciencecast.org/welcome))# Demos\n\n# Recommenders and Search Tools\n\nInfluence Flower\n\n*(*[What are Influence Flowers?](https://influencemap.cmlab.dev/))\nCORE Recommender\n\n*(*[What is CORE?](https://core.ac.uk/services/recommender))# arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators\n\narXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.\n\nBoth individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.\n\nHave an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? [ Learn more about arXivLabs](https://info.arxiv.org/labs/index.html).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/most-biomedical-publications-show-signs-of-llm-assisted-writing", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10715", "published_at": "2026-08-12 11:07:07+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-12 11:41:48.746956+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-policy", "ai-research"], "entities": ["arXiv", "PubMed Central"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/most-biomedical-publications-show-signs-of-llm-assisted-writing", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/most-biomedical-publications-show-signs-of-llm-assisted-writing.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/most-biomedical-publications-show-signs-of-llm-assisted-writing.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/most-biomedical-publications-show-signs-of-llm-assisted-writing.jsonld"}}