The Silent Author in Urology: Quantifying Large Language Model Influence at the Corpus Level

The recent increasing use of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT in scientific writing raises concerns about authenticity and accuracy in biomedical literature. This study aims to quantify the prevalence of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated text in urology abstracts from 2010 to 2024 and assess its variation across journal categories and impact factor quartiles.

Methods

A retrospective analysis was conducted on 64,444 unique abstracts from 38 journals in the field of urology published between 2010-2024 and retrieved via the Entrez API from PubMed. Abstracts were then categorized by subspecialty and stratified by impact factor (IF). A synthetic reference corpus of 10,000 abstracts was generated using GPT-3.5-turbo. A mixture model estimated the proportion of AI-generated text annually, using maximum likelihood estimation with Laplace smoothing. Calibration and specificity of the estimator were assessed using pre-LLM abstracts and controlled mixtures of real and synthetic text. Statistical analyses were performed using Python 3.13.

Results

The proportion of AI-like text was negligible from 2010 to 2019, rising to 1.8% in 2020 and 5.3% in 2024. In 2024, Men’s Health journals showed the highest AI-like text, while Oncology journals had the lowest. Journals in the highest and lowest IF quartiles showed a higher proportion of AI-like text than mid-quartiles. Type-Token Ratio (TTR) remained stable across the study period. Our validation calibration set showed an area under the curve of 0.5326.

Conclusion

Textual patterns similar to AI-generated language has risen sharply in urology abstracts since ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, and this trend varies by journal type and IF.

Patient summary

We looked at whether large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT are influencing the way urology research is written. We found that signs of LLM-like text were rare in abstracts before 2020 but increased in recent years, especially after the release of ChatGPT. Some journal types use these tools more than others. These findings help raise awareness about the growing role of artificial intelligence in scientific communication.