The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is soaring, and the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has accelerated this trend. This “chatbot” can generate complete scientific articles, with risk of plagiarism by mining existing data or downright fraud by fabricating studies with no real data at all. There are tools that detect AI in publications, but to our knowledge they have not been systematically assessed for publication in scientific journals. We therefore conducted a retrospective study on articles published in Orthopaedics & Traumatology: Surgery & Research (OTSR): firstly, to screen for AI-generated content before and after the publicized launch of ChatGPT; secondly, to assess whether AI was more often used in some countries than others to generate content; thirdly, to determine whether plagiarism rate correlated with AI-generation, and lastly, to determine whether elements other than text generation, and notably the translation procedure, could raise suspicion of AI use.

The rate of AI use increased after the publicized launch of ChatGPT v3.5 in November 2022.

In all, 425 articles published between February 2022 and September 2023 (221 before and 204 after November 1, 2022) underwent ZeroGPT assessment of the level of AI generation in the final English-language version (abstract and body of the article). Two scores were obtained: probability of AI generation, in six grades from Human to AI; and percentage AI generation. Plagiarism was assessed on the Ithenticate application at submission. Articles in French were assessed in their English-language version as translated by a human translator, with comparison to automatic translation by Google Translate and DeepL.

AI-generated text was detected mainly in Abstracts, with a 10.1% rate of AI or considerable AI generation, compared to only 1.9% for the body of the article and 5.6% for the total body+abstract. Analysis for before and after November 2022 found an increase in AI generation in body+abstract, from 10.30±15.95% (range, 0–100%) to 15.64±19.8% (range, 0–99.93) (p < 0.04; NS for abstracts alone). AI scores differed between types of article: 14.9% for original articles and 9.8% for reviews (p<0.01). The highest rates of probable AI generation were in articles from Japan, China, South America and English-speaking countries (p<0.0001). Plagiarism rates did not increase between the two study periods, and were unrelated to AI rates. On the other hand, when articles were classified as “suspected” of AI generation (plagiarism rate ≥ 20%) or “non-suspected” (rate<20%), the “similarity” score was higher in suspect articles: 25.7±13.23% (range, 10–69%) versus 16.28±10% (range, 0–79%) (p < 0.001). In the body of the article, use of translation software was associated with higher AI rates than with a human translator: 3.5±5% for human translators, versus 18±10% and 21.9±11% respectively for Google Translate and DeepL (p < 0.001).

The present study revealed an increasing rate of AI use in articles published in OTSR. AI grades differed according to type of article and country of origin. Use of translation software increased the AI grade. In the long run, use of ChatGPT incurs a risk of plagiarism and scientific misconduct, and needs to be detected and signaled by a digital tag on any robot-generated text.

III; case-control study.