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Generative AI in scientific publishing: disruptive or destructive?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize scientific publishing. The influence of AI could be disruptive or destructive and its influence remains to be seen, but balance between the convenience and accessibility offered by AI-driven tools and the essential skills of deep scientific inquiry and communication needs to be found.

In the past few decades, an exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge has occurred, setting the stage for potentially major advances1; however, a noticeable declining trend in disruptive scientific discoveries has happened in parallel. Analysis of millions of papers showed that this trend is unlikely to be driven by changes in citation practices or by the quality of published works. Rather, such a decline could represent a substantive shift in science, with a decreasing revolutionary nature of discoveries and inventions2. However one chooses to perceive the decline in groundbreaking scientific discoveries, it stands in contrast to the exponential growth in the number of published research papers3. We believe that this observation is as an intriguing paradox that raises questions about the evolving dynamics happening within the scientific community.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urology, Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria Integrata, Borgo Trento Hospital, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Riccardo Bertolo & Alessandro Antonelli

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  1. Riccardo Bertolo
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  2. Alessandro Antonelli
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Riccardo Bertolo.

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Bertolo, R., Antonelli, A. Generative AI in scientific publishing: disruptive or destructive?.
Nat Rev Urol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41585-023-00836-w

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  • Published: 15 November 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41585-023-00836-w

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