During the pre-Google days, a research paper had to be written by hand before it could be written on a manual typewriter. , Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
I read Gemma Conroy’s article Nature) How scientists used ChatGPT to build an entire research paper from scratch. When I saw this report, I was surprised and angry at the same time. When I started publishing research papers in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate medical student, it got me thinking about how much has changed during the past 50 years.
When I started my journey of publishing research papers, there was no PubMed or Google, why, there were no computers! One had to go to the library of the medical college, if one was lucky, there would be a journal related to his subject, but the articles would have been published many months before because the journals were sent by surface mail from abroad. One had to manually read the articles, look at the references at the end of the article, tabulate the cross references, make a list of necessary relevant papers and then start the process of trying to get those articles Had to do Some would be available at the National Medical Library in Delhi, but this would mean traveling to Delhi to obtain references, and it was not cheap. Furthermore, after spending a day or two browsing the magazines, one would have to request copies of the articles, which could take weeks as they would have to be photocopied and sent to Chennai.
With regard to writing articles, since there were no computers, they had to be written by hand and then typed on a manual typewriter. One had to keep a separate list of references and add them to the article as the paper progressed. By the 1980s, computers had arrived which made it much easier to type articles. With the advent of PubMed and Google, life became much easier for the researcher, because, at the touch of a button, one could obtain abstracts of all relevant articles published at least anywhere in the world. This still meant that the articles themselves would have to be written.
Soon, the concept of ‘ghostwriting’ through medical writers came about and some, especially those in the pharmaceutical industry, began employing these medical writers to write articles for them. Finally, we are now in an era where entire research articles are written by ChatGPT!
What does this mean for the young researcher?
We are seeing a decline in skills across all sectors. In medical medicine the stethoscope, or using your fingers to palpate the abdomen or palpate the chest or listen, is fast disappearing as these are being replaced by X-ray, CT and MRI scans. I find that some of the young doctors, who come to train with me, are also unable to write patient case notes properly. Their reading skills have decreased significantly and most of them use cell phones for whatever information they want. With the advent of ChatGPT, this could be the death knell for scientific writing among junior researchers. ChatGPT is so clever that plagiarism is also difficult to detect. It would be a pity if our mental abilities and skills were not honed and we lost the skill of scientific writing.
Of course, we can use software to help us with our research, but asking programs like ChatGPT to write entire papers defeats the very purpose of scientific inquiry. Word research It literally means that we have to search and find again. When using something like ChatGPT, there’s no searching or research to be done, instead, we’re just outsourcing the work to the computer.
I can predict that if this trend continues, the number of publications, number of citations, impact factor of journals, h-index and other scientometric indices used to measure research, will all become redundant. Scientific fraud will also be difficult to detect, because as these programs improve, they will make fraud more difficult to detect. For those of us who grew up in the traditional way of conducting research, these developments are worrying to say the least. It’s even more frightening when we look ahead to what the next frontier in computers and artificial intelligence will bring.
,The author is President, Madras Diabetes Research Foundation, Chennai)