Remember the movie, The Imitation Game. It was about British computer scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and cryptoanalyst, Alan Turing. In 1950, he published the article, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Turing, 1950). This groundbreaking article provided insights that helped produce "artificial intelligence" (Cowell, 2019, June 5).
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is integrated into many aspects of our lives. It is the backbone of Siri and Alexa (Mintz & Brodie, 2019). It is involved in the automation of mass transportation and the movies added to our Netflix queue. It is improving health care by speeding up processes and achieving greater accuracy. In turn, AI is "opening the path to providing better health care overall" (Mintz & Brodie, 2019, p. 73). This is good news. Now, for the bad news, a few weeks ago, I received an email from a reader of JANAC asking for help in locating a previously published article. Like the reader, I went to PubMed. When I searched by the author's last name, I could not find the article. When I searched by the doi number, I could not find the article. I tried searching by the title of the article, but nothing could be found. I repeated all these steps in Google Scholar, nothing could be found there as well.
Being unable to locate the article, I then searched the Editorial Manager system associated with the journal. When I searched by the last names of the authors, I could not find the article. I searched again by manuscript title; again, nothing could be found. At this point, I was stumped. I responded to the reader indicating that I was not able to locate the article.
A few hours later, the reader responded that a co-author of the developing manuscript shared that the citations were generated by AI.
"Transformative, disruptive technologies, like AI language models, create promise and opportunities as well as risks and threats for all involved in the scientific enterprise" (Flanagin et al., 2023, p. 638). For example, Majovsky et al. (2023) documented that the AI language model can create "a highly convincing fraudulent article that resembled a genuine scientific paper in terms of word usage, sentence structure, and overall composition" (p. 1).
In support of JANAC's core value of integrity, we strive to publish articles of the highest quality (Relf et al., 2020). As such, we must examine the role of AI in scientific publishing and make decisions to preserve the integrity of manuscripts published by JANAC.
In the journal's Instructions for Authors (available at https://edmgr.ovid.com/janac/accounts/ifauth.htm#Authorship), like many journals, we follow the criteria for authorship as described by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, or ICMJE (https://www.icmje.org/). In May 2023, ICMJE updated their guidelines to specifically address AI in regard to authorship and peer review and peer review (ICJME, 2023); please refer to the following link for more information, https://www.icmje.org/news-and-editorials/icmje-recommendations_annotated_may23.).
Upon approval of the JANAC Editorial Board, effective immediately, to maintain the integrity of JANAC and in support of the guidelines offered by ICMJE (May 2023), JANAC will implement the following procedures:
* At the time of submission, JANAC requires authors to disclose if artificial intelligence technologies were used in the production of the submission manuscript. As a reminder, all authors are responsible for the content of a submitted manuscript, including the legitimacy of references, and the interpretation, application, and contextualization of findings.
* Artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted technologies, including Chatbots such as ChatGPT and those to be developed in the future, should not be listed as authors because they are not able to assume responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work, which are criteria for authorship as outlined by ICMJE in section II.A.1.
* Works created by or attributed to AI technologies, unless part of the formal research design or methods, should not be cited as an author.
Disclosures
The authors report no real or perceived vested interests related to this article that could be construed as a conflict of interest.
Author Contributions
Michael V. Relf was involved with the conceptualization, writing the original draft, and review and editing.
References