Welcome to the Rigorous Reproducible Responsible Research Integrity at UF (R4I@UF) website! Please visit each month for a new case that may be used as a framework for a brief conversation about best research practices in your lab meeting, research conference, journal club, or any research meeting.
July-August 2025 Case of the Month: Using AI to Write a Manuscript
Dr. Blue is principal investigator at the NIH who specializes in cancer genotyping. A prestigious review journal has asked Dr. Blue to write an article reviewing the current state of the field. Dr. Blue is very busy with clinical, research, and administrative responsibilities, so Dr. Blue asks Dr. Green, a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab, to write the review. Without telling Dr. Blue, Dr. Green uses an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to summarize the literature on this topic and generate references. Dr. Blue reads the review and congratulates Dr. Green on a job well done. They submit the solicited review to the journal. The article lists Drs. Blue and Green as authors but does not acknowledge the use of the AI in preparing the article. Two months after publication, an anonymous critique of the article, appearing in a post-publication peer review blog, claims that two of the citations in the article are fake.
The editors of the review journal inform Dr. Blue about this and ask the authors to submit a correction. Dr. Blue meets with Dr. Green about the issue and asks how the problem occurred. Dr. Green admits to using an AI tool to help write the article and says the tool must have made the mistakes. Dr. Blue is furious at Dr. Green for using this tool without consulting with the corresponding author first. They both carefully examine the references and verify that the two references mentioned by the critic are indeed fake. They also discover that three additional references are inaccurate, three are irrelevant, and two sentences in the article are copied word-for-word from another article without quotation marks or attribution.
Discussion Questions
1. When Dr. Blue and Dr. Green submit their correction to the journal, should they also address the inaccurate and irrelevant references and the copied sentences and acknowledge the use of the AI tool?
2. Should they explain how the problem occurred, i.e., that the AI tool made the mistakes?
3. Should they retract the article?
4. Did they commit research misconduct, i.e., plagiarism?
5. What are the responsibilities of authors when using AI tools to review the literature?
For more information, see resources for Avoiding Research Misconduct and ICMJE: Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors. This case was copied from Research Cases for Use by the NIH Community.
This website is a service of UF Research Integrity, Security & Compliance and the “RCR on Campus” working group. We believe that research integrity is not achieved by simply taking an RCR course and “checking the box” that training is done. Our vision is to maintain a research culture in our everyday lives as UF researchers and research trainees in which we naturally follow best practices to ensure that the research we do is responsible, rigorous, and reproducible.
To submit a “Case of the Month” for the R4I@UF website, please contact Wayne T. McCormack, PhD (mccormac at ufl.edu).