Scientific papers that mention AI get a citation boost
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Computer scientists have embraced the use of artificial-intelligence tools. Credit: James MacDonald/Bloomberg/Getty
Papers with titles or abstracts that mention certain artificial intelligence (AI) methods are more likely to be among the top 5% most-cited works in their field for a given year than are those that don’t reference those techniques, an analysis has found. These papers also tend to receive more citations from outside of their field than do studies that don’t refer to AI terms.
But this ‘citation boost’ was not shared equally by all authors. The analysis also showed that researchers from groups that have historically been underrepresented in science don’t get the same bump in citations as their counterparts do when they use AI tools in their work — suggesting that AI could exacerbate existing inequalities .
The findings emerged from a study that aimed to quantify the use and potential benefits of AI in scientific research. But the report, published last week in Nature Human Behaviour , also raises concerns. Scientists might be incentivized to use AI purely as a way to increase their citations — regardless of whether the AI tools improve the quality of the work, notes Lisa Messeri, an anthropologist of science and technology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “We want to make sure that, as we are [investing] in AI, we are not doing that at the deficit of other approaches,” she says.
