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Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) usage guidelines for scholarly publishing: a cross-sectional study of medical journals

Shuhui Yin, Simu Huang, P. Xue, Zhuoran Xu, Z. Lian, Chenfei Ye, Siyuan Ma, Mingxuan Liu et al.

BMC Medicine, 2025

200 participants · 20 citations

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has developed rapidly and been increasingly used in scholarly publishing, so it is urgent to examine guidelines for its usage. This cross-sectional study aims to examine the coverage and type of recommendations of GAI usage guidelines among medical journals and how these factors relate to journal characteristics. From the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) list for medicine in 2022, we generated two groups of journals: top SJR ranked journals (N = 200) and random sample of non-top SJR ranked journals (N = 140). For each group, we examined the coverage of author and reviewer guidelines across four categories: no guidelines, external guidelines only, own guidelines only, and own and external guidelines. We then calculated the number of recommendations by counting the number of usage recommendations for author and reviewer guidelines separately. Regression models examined the relationship of journal characteristics with the coverage and type of recommendations of GAI usage guidelines. A higher proportion of top SJR ranked journals provided author guidelines compared to the random sample of non-top SJR ranked journals (95.0% vs. 86.7%, P < 0.01). The two groups of journals had the same median of 5 on a scale of 0 to 7 for author guidelines and a median of 1 on a scale of 0 to 2 for reviewer guidelines. However, both groups had lower percentages of journals providing recommendations for data analysis and interpretation, with the random sample of…

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