← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.11174 · v1
What Changed in Engineering Writing After Generative AI Chat Assistants: Evidence from 1.8 Million Articles
首次提交 2026-11-08 14:33
版本更新 2026-11-08 14:33
雷达观测 2026-11-10 12:16
摘要
This study asks what changed in engineering articles after conversational language models became publicly available on November 30, 2022, and develops methods for measuring such change in a field without a uniform abstract index. It assembled 1,839,962 articles published from 2015 to 2025 in 256 engineering journals, tracked twelve measures of wording, style, and article structure, and compared each with the projection of its own pre-2023 trend. Building the monthly series showed that records dated only by year fall on January 1 and create false January peaks unless removed. In abstracts, 31 words associated with language model output appeared 82% more often than projected (55.4 against 27.0 per 10,000 words in 2025), while four control words of the same formal register fell 16%. Words that soften a claim, such as may, fell 13%, words that strengthen one, such as clearly, rose 20%, and long words rose 11%. Author counts, reference lists, page counts, and publication volume stayed within 4% of trend. The change appears in all fourteen subject categories, and false release dates, dropping any one journal or word, and word lists chosen from the data support it. A random sample of 12,866 full texts from the same corpus, including subscription articles and weighted back to it, shows the same words rising 99% in article bodies. Statements disclosing AI writing assistance, measured apart from mentions of language models, went from none to 3.7% in 2025, four in five of them at one publisher. The design is descriptive, not causal.
作者备注：26 pages, 5 figures, 7 tables. Code and data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24028663
观测到的版本
相邻记录可能跳过中间版本；首次发现 v2 及以上也会标为版本更新。
v1 · 2026-11-08 14:33 · 最新观测版本
What Changed in Engineering Writing After Generative AI Chat Assistants: Evidence from 1.8 Million Articles
This study asks what changed in engineering articles after conversational language models became publicly available on November 30, 2022, and develops methods for measuring such change in a field without a uniform abstract index. It assembled 1,839,962 articles published from 2015 to 2025 in 256 engineering journals, tracked twelve measures of wording, style, and article structure, and compared each with the projection of its own pre-2023 trend. Building the monthly series showed that records dated only by year fall on January 1 and create false January peaks unless removed. In abstracts, 31 words associated with language model output appeared 82% more often than projected (55.4 against 27.0 per 10,000 words in 2025), while four control words of the same formal register fell 16%. Words that soften a claim, such as may, fell 13%, words that strengthen one, such as clearly, rose 20%, and long words rose 11%. Author counts, reference lists, page counts, and publication volume stayed within 4% of trend. The change appears in all fourteen subject categories, and false release dates, dropping any one journal or word, and word lists chosen from the data support it. A random sample of 12,866 full texts from the same corpus, including subscription articles and weighted back to it, shows the same words rising 99% in article bodies. Statements disclosing AI writing assistance, measured apart from mentions of language models, went from none to 3.7% in 2025, four in five of them at one publisher. The design is descriptive, not causal.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗