Over 10% of new medical papers are being written by AI now—three years ago, that number was zero.
March 23, 2026
Original Paper
Rising Prevalence of Detected AI-Generated Text in Medical Literature: Longitudinal Analysis in Open Access Articles
arXiv · 2603.19316
The Takeaway
A longitudinal study of thousands of medical articles found that AI-generated content is skyrocketing in peer-reviewed literature. Despite the high volume, only a tiny fraction of these authors disclosed they used AI, which raises major concerns about the reliability of human oversight in modern medical advice.
From the abstract
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are becoming increasingly used for writing tasks. However, the extent of their use in peer-reviewed medical literature remains unclear. We conducted a longitudinal analysis of all Original Investigations, Research Letters, and Invited Commentaries published in JAMA Network Open from January 2022 through March 2025. The main body text of 7,251 articles was analyzed using a commercial AI-detection tool (this http URL) to estimate the probability that m