Delving into “delve”

It turns out that ChatGPT tends to overuse certain words and phrases, including “delve”. According to one post, “delve” is among the 10 most common words found in text returned by ChatGPT.

If scientific authors use ChatGPT to assist them in writing their papers, then it is likely that these common ChatGPT words will appear, especially in introductions, abstracts and possibly titles.

Indeed, Jeremy Nguyen (@JeremyNguyenPhD) finds that mention of “delve” in papers on PubMed has greatly increased since 2023 (when ChatGPT appeared). He has Tweeted about this https://twitter.com/JeremyNguyenPhD/status/1774021645709295840

This peaked my curiosity. But it would seem that these counts need to be normalized to get a sense of how the proportion of papers using “delve” has grown. So, I took a look, using OpenAlex, an open source platform that indexes papers and other scholarly outputs.

Here is what I found. Although the use of “delve” was gradually increasing through to 2022, it jumped noticeably in 2023 (when ChatGPT became widely available) and has continued to increase in 2024 (data is for part year, latest point available at time of analysis). See Figure 1. This chart shows both the count and the normalized percentage of papers with “delve” in their title or abstract, by publication year. The source is OpenAlex, filtered by articles (which includes peer-reviewed journal papers and preprints).

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