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Abstract: In an earlier work, Demaine and Demaine propose that every author be a first author by superimposing all author names on the same spot of the title page. The construction is typographically unstable, because names have different natural widths. The superimposed block is ragged and the longest name dominates the visual mass, reintroducing exactly the ordering advantage the standard removes. We close this loophole. Each name is distorted by two knobs, a horizontal glyph scale and an inter-letter tracking, until all names occupy one common width $W$. We give a quadratic distortion model, solve the per-name trade-off in closed form by Lagrange multipliers, and show that the total-distortion optimal common width is a stiffness-weighted mean of the natural widths. We provide implementations as a $\LaTeX$ package and a Typst package, covering author blocks and bibliography entries alike; this paper typesets its own author block and its own reference with the former. Every proposition is machine-checked in Lean. The $\LaTeX$ and Typst packages, as well as the proofs, are available at https://github.com/MrP01/EveryAuthorIsFirstAuthor.

Abstract: Argument mining in full-text scholarly articles remains an important yet challenging task. This difficulty stems not only from the need to model long-distance dependencies but also from the substantial effort required to annotate sentence-level argumentative components throughout lengthy documents. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach that leverages scientific entity mentions (e.g., tasks, datasets, and models) to identify and structure claims in scholarly literature. We validate our approach through a case study involving 50 full-text research papers on sentiment analysis. We first establish a reliable human gold standard (Krippendorff's $α= 0.80$), identifying 113 claim-bearing sentences and extracting 199 structured claim records from 300 candidate sentences. To address the annotation bottleneck, we employ a majority-voting ensemble of large language models (LLMs) to generate a silver-standard dataset comprising 1,487 claims. Encoders fine-tuned exclusively on the silver-standard dataset outperform those trained on a small human-annotated gold-standard dataset and demonstrate strong zero-shot transfer to NLP papers outside the training corpus.

Abstract: The number of paper submissions to major AI conferences has increased dramatically in recent years, substantially increasing the peer-review workload of researchers. At the same time, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support peer review, both by individual reviewers and by conference organizations. While LLM capabilities have improved considerably, their evaluations may be influenced by linguistic characteristics that are unrelated to scientific content. In this work, we introduce a controlled experimental framework for studying such effects by systematically perturbing the linguistic style of research papers. Specifically, we rewrite papers to exhibit (i) linguistic features associated with native or non-native English writing, and (ii) high- or low-confidence linguistic features. To construct these interventions, we derive fine-grained rewriting instructions grounded in the linguistic literature and apply them using LLMs. Crucially, our interventions are designed to preserve the underlying scientific content. We then evaluate the resulting papers using different LLM reviewers. Our experiments expose a critical vulnerability in LLM-based peer review: reviewers systematically reward confident rhetoric independent of scientific content, raising serious concerns about the robustness of their assessments.

Abstract: As an experiment in agentic assisted analysis, we used an agentic AI model to analyse the effect of agentic AI on arXiv submissions; data acquisition, analysis and the first draft were carried out by the model under the author's direction. Monthly arXiv submissions have grown exponentially for three decades, at about $9\%$ per year. Fitting a piecewise log-linear trend with seasonal modulation to the full record, we find two post-pandemic breaks in growth rate. The first, in mid-2022, precedes ChatGPT and is carried by the expansion of AI research within computer science (CS); outside CS, growth from 2022 to 2025 remained at $8\%$ per year. The second, between December 2025 and February 2026, follows the release of models capable of extended autonomous work and is absent from the AI categories themselves. Since December 2025 submissions without a CS listing have run $17\%$ above trend, and in September 2026 total submissions reached a record $40\,363$. The excess is largest in mathematics, where submissions doubled within a year, and follows a gradient from formal and theoretical fields to experimental ones that is not ordered by surveyed rates of AI-tool adoption. In mathematics the increase is distributed across subfields and authors, two-thirds of it arising from a larger number of distinct authors rather than from a few prolific submitters. Across fields the clearest signature is a shift to single authorship: solo-authored papers rose by $70\%$ within a year in mathematics and condensed matter, and by $44\%$ in quantitative biology even as its total output fell, but not in experimental particle physics. The analysis is deliberately agnostic of LLM-detection methods: it uses only submission counts and metadata, with treatment timing fixed by calendar dates, and is therefore free of the outcome-triggered timing bias of author-level studies.

Abstract: Preprint servers and open science platforms have become core infrastructure through which scientific knowledge circulates on the Web, greatly facilitating the dissemination and diffusion of online scientific information. Yet to safeguard content quality, many of these platforms rely on existing members to vouch for newcomers; how such network-mediated gatekeeping reshapes entry barriers across different scientific communities remains systematically underexplored. To address this, I examine the potential unequal impacts of this mechanism through arXiv's tightening of its endorsement policy in early 2026. Using the metadata of three million arXiv papers and the co-authorship networks of each research community, I compare the influx and dynamics of first-time submitters before and after the policy across eight disciplines. The findings show that the policy reduced the entry of new authors, and this reduction was concentrated in fields where co-authorship ties are sparse, while fields with dense collaboration networks were largely spared. A comparison with a parallel preprint server in biology suggests that this likely reflects a shift in where researchers choose to post rather than a decline in research activity. These findings demonstrate that the network structure of a scientific community shapes who can enter online scientific production, advancing our understanding of how the Web's open knowledge infrastructure shapes inequality in the diffusion of science.

Abstract: Editorial policies increasingly require authors to disclose substantive uses of generative AI, but such requirements commonly focus on whether, where, and how a model was used. Even function-specific disclosure may locate a model in the research or writing process without showing how its outputs entered scholarly judgment, how they were evaluated, or whether contributors can reconstruct the relevant reasoning and defend resulting claims without treating those outputs as sufficient justification. Drawing on research ethics, AI disclosure policy, human-model interaction, and researcher formation, this article argues that disclosure documents model use, whereas responsible use requires claim-level authorial warrant: a contributor's capacity to understand, justify, and defend claims within their contribution. The article distinguishes cognitive delegation, in which model outputs shape substantive choices, interpretations, or justifications, from routine delegation, which does not ordinarily bear on the substance of judgment. Its conceptual contribution is to link the epistemic role of outputs that shape judgment to the function-appropriate evaluation required to justify decisions and retain warrant for resulting claims. It then repurposes disclosure categories as a claim-sensitive ex ante heuristic, mapping six recurrent research functions to risks, forms of oversight, and formative questions for recognising cognitive delegation and selecting function-appropriate evaluation. The article contributes to the ethics of information technology by clarifying when AI-supported scholarship remains under responsible human judgment and when cognitive delegation threatens the epistemic basis of authorship.

Abstract: Automated research is largely evaluated by benchmark performance, but the value of research rarely reduces to a single score. Humans judge a work's holistic contribution through peer review, which is hard to model because it is noisy and depends on many factors. However, what if, given only the paper, we could predict its peer-review decision directly? We introduce PaperScorer, a family of models that predict a paper's accept or reject decision from its extracted text or page screenshots, training only on the decision after removing author identity and formatting shortcuts. Vision models are the most predictive (68% accuracy on ICLR papers and 77% on ML papers from arXiv), beating text-only and frontier reasoning models. Unlike plain text, page images retain figures, layout, and presentation. This signal is robust, surviving smaller models and even compressing the whole paper into a single image. But accurate predictions are not evenly spread. PaperScorer is strongest on the lowest and highest rated papers, while papers rated in the middle stay unpredictable for our models and frontier systems alike. Additionally, its confidence is calibrated, so its most confident predictions are also its most accurate. Overall, PaperScorer shows how much of the decision a paper carries on its own, marking a first step toward AI-driven research evaluation.

Abstract: Every scientific text is embedded in the writing norms of its time: it reflects earlier publications while also shaping the texts that follow. The growing use of LLM-based writing tools introduces a new factor in this evolving system, but the linguistic changes coinciding with their emergence remain insufficiently understood. We investigate whether the trajectories of scientific-preprint writing changed in rate or direction after conversational LLMs became publicly accessible, using the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 as the observational breakpoint. We compare pre- and post-2022 trajectories across vocabulary, punctuation, readability, and syntax in abstracts from arXiv's artificial intelligence, statistics, and quantitative biology categories and from medRxiv. Using interrupted time-series regression, we find substantial post-2022 changes across multiple feature families and research domains, including increases in average word length, reduced formula-based readability, and declines in maximum dependency-tree depth and sentence-level depth variation. Individual features follow different dynamics: some lexical markers accelerate persistently, while others rise and then recede. Our findings show that isolated marker frequencies capture only part of the shift: changes in the rate, direction, and structure of linguistic trajectories provide complementary evidence of broader post-2022 change in scientific-preprint writing. More broadly, these findings motivate monitoring scientific writing as a multidimensional, evolving system rather than through a fixed set of LLM-associated markers.

Abstract: The increasing specialization of scientific research calls for fine-grained representations of publication content that can be applied at scale. SCALE extends the OpenAlex taxonomy with approximately 114,000 Scientific Concepts derived from author keywords, but assigning these Concepts to individual publications remains challenging. We introduce MATCH (Multi-stage Article Tagging to Concept Hierarchies), a framework that assigns SCALE Concepts using article titles, abstracts, and author keywords. MATCH combines multi-view embedding retrieval, deterministic taxonomy-aware filtering, and language-model reranking to select relevant Concepts while preserving their hierarchical paths. Its modular design supports both API-based and self-hosted inference. In a blind evaluation involving 22 domain experts across 11 fields and 110 articles, the self-hosted and API-based configurations achieved Precision of 81.5% and 83.3%, respectively, and Precision@5 of approximately 89% for both, with no statistically significant difference detected. These findings support the practical viability of the evaluated self-hosted configuration for large-scale Concept assignment without per-token API charges. Deployed on over two million MDPI publications, MATCH assigns a median of five Concepts per article, covers approximately 94% of the SCALE Concepts, and supports daily indexing of newly available publications. By operationalizing the SCALE taxonomy at publication level, MATCH provides a foundation for fine-grained scientometric analysis and monitoring of scientific developments.

Abstract: Paper-to-patent citations connect scientific and technological documents, but their interpretability depends on how patents are used in the citing text. This study examines citation contexts and paper-level outcome associations in AI-related articles in PubMed Central (PMC). Screening 189,073 articles identified 746 with explicitly tagged patent references (0.395%), including 713 with 1,544 identifiable in-text patent-citation instances. Three large language models classified these instances by represented content, motivation, textual position, and evaluative stance. Regression models examined associations among these dimensions, and propensity-score-matched regressions compared patent-citing papers with XML-screened controls. Background-oriented citations were predominantly neutral and introductory, whereas adoption-oriented citations were more closely associated with methodological positions and supportive evaluations. These patterns suggest heuristic configurations of contextualization, operationalization, and problematization, although classification overlap and exclusion of rare categories limit their interpretation. In matched samples, the patent-citing indicator was associated with lower scholarly-citation measures and more citations received from patents. These associations are observational, not causal. Together, these findings show that paper-to-patent citations encode heterogeneous forms of engagement with patented technology and should be interpreted as selective bibliographic signals rather than direct indicators of technology-to-science knowledge transfer or research value.

Abstract: Prior work suggests fraudulent scientists write their articles with higher rates of linguistic obfuscation than genuine scientists, with a possible mechanism suggesting obfuscation makes research more costly for a reader to analyze. This result has not undergone additional empirical scrutiny in the open science era, nor have other psychological mechanisms been evaluated. The current replication and extension addressed this opportunity by comparing 800 fraudulent and 800 genuine control papers (2013-2025). The results supported the linguistic obfuscation hypothesis, suggesting fraudulent papers were more obfuscated than genuine ones. A parallel mediation model evaluated three competing mechanisms, finding that reality monitoring, as measured through decreased rates of adjectives, best explained the link between fraudulent science and linguistic obfuscation. Cross-validated detection accuracy using obfuscation features (60.7%) and an elastic net of over 100 language dimensions (71.6%) were significantly greater than chance. Implications for scientific fraud and psychology of language research are discussed.

Abstract: Selective databases such as Scopus periodically re-evaluate the titles they index and remove those that no longer meet their quality criteria. Once a journal is removed, its subsequent output is no longer recorded, and the consequences of this process have therefore received little attention. This study analyzes the publication output and citation impact of 514 sources delisted from Scopus between 2018 and 2024, based on 678,162 documents retrieved from OpenAlex over a window of three years before and after delisting. Differences between periods are tested with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test for paired samples, globally and by geographic region, field of knowledge and SJR quartile. Output grows until the year of delisting and falls sharply afterwards. The median annual output per journal drops from 35 to 22 documents (-37.1%; p < 0.001; r = 0.30), 61.7% of journals publish less, and 84 (16.3%) have no documents recorded in OpenAlex after delisting. Citations per document, measured over a three-year window, barely change when each journal is compared with itself (-2.4%; p = 0.079), and journals are almost evenly split between those whose impact falls and those whose impact holds steady or rises. The results indicate that delisting makes these journals less attractive as publication venues but does not penalize the citation of the work they publish to the same extent, which raises concerns from a research integrity perspective.

Abstract: Predicting the future impact of a newly published paper is challenging because it must be inferred from heterogeneous evidence available at publication time. Existing approaches often rely on a single source of information or combine multiple sources without accounting for their different predictive roles. In this paper, we present LLM4Impact, an evidence-aware method for scientific impact prediction that learns to represent, integrate, and calibrate heterogeneous information. LLM4Impact combines semantic, graph, LLM, and temporal representations, and injects graph information into a frozen LLM through continuous prefix tokens. A context aware gating mechanism adaptively weights different evidence, while a separate calibration module accounts for domain and temporal variation in citation scales. We further construct a large-scale benchmark dataset with 2 million papers, leakage-safe point-in-time heterogeneous ego graphs, temporal splits, and both year-level and month-level citation targets. Experiments show that LLM4Impact consistently outperforms strong semantic, graph, and LLM based baselines, with a 10.13% reduction in year RMSE on the in distribution test set and a 6.87% reduction under out-of-domain distribution. Our results reveal that the value of such evidence is context dependent: different papers benefit from different sources, while domain and publication time affect how evidence translates into citations. This finding motivates adaptive evidence selection and context-conditioned calibration rather than simply richer representations. We will release our code, benchmark, and an interactive web demonstration upon publication.

Abstract: As LLMs increasingly assist scientific writing and peer review, detecting who wrote the text is no longer sufficient: we need to determine who contributed the underlying insight. We introduce Insight Provenance, the task of identifying whether a review insight originates from a human, an LLM, or their hybrid contribution. We construct InsightProv-v0 from 4,057 scientific papers and 12,660 human reviews, simulating different levels of LLM involvement with GPT-4o, Gemini, and DeepSeek and annotating provenance at the sentence level. We show that strong performance on raw data can be misleading, as models exploit linguistic and textual-authorship shortcuts that degrade substantially under progressively debiased evaluation. We therefore propose a two-stage adversarial framework that suppresses shortcut signals while preserving provenance-relevant information. Beyond detection, extensive analyses reveal what makes intellectual authorship identifiable: paper grounding and neighboring review context provide complementary provenance signals, while human, hybrid, and AI insights systematically differ in their information sources and failure modes. Most strikingly, AI insights predominantly remain close to generic or paper-provided information, whereas human insights more often introduce external knowledge and independent judgment. These findings suggest that while wording can be rewritten by an LLM, the provenance of an idea leaves a deeper and more persistent signal.

Abstract: AI reviewers can assign different judgments to manuscripts that report the same science in different wording, potentially rewarding rhetorical optimization over scientific improvement. We formulate Rhetorical Robustness as the joint requirement of stability across content-preserving rewrites and discrimination across papers. We introduce RobustReview, a controlled full-manuscript benchmark with 1,260 manuscript versions, and evaluate 30 reviewer configurations. The benchmark reveals false robustness, where low rewrite sensitivity coincides with score collapse across papers, and shows that human alignment and rhetorical robustness rank reviewers differently. Moreover, the evaluated content-focused prompting protocol does not consistently improve robustness across backbones. Motivated by these findings, we introduce SciCore, a dual-branch reviewer that averages a full-manuscript judgment with a judgment based on an extracted, structured science core. This design combines manuscript-level assessment with a content-normalized view intended to reduce rhetorical sensitivity. In our primary GPT-5.5 comparison, SciCore achieves a leading joint stability-discrimination profile among the benchmarked reviewers while maintaining competitive human alignment. These results identify rhetorical robustness as a distinct evaluation target and demonstrate the potential of science-core review to improve it.

Abstract: Scientific output is growing rapidly, but it is unclear whether the expanding literature remains original or is increasingly repeating itself. Originality has many dimensions. One dimension can now be measured directly: how textually distinct a paper is from the work that came before it. Using semantic language models, we screened more than 26,000 full-text papers across eight fields in the CORE database (2015--2025) for passages resembling recent literature. We compared every paper against a fixed-size sample of earlier work, so increases in resemblance are not a by-product of literature growth. We find that the share of a paper's text resembling recent work was stable before 2021, then rose sharply, more than tripling by 2025. The increase came not from a few papers borrowing more heavily but from resemblance spreading across the literature: more papers now contain passages that echo recent work, and almost none of this growth is explained by cited work. We also found an analogous increase in passages expressing the same scientific idea. The pattern held across robustness checks and replicated in a second, independent database. Along this one measurable axis of originality, scientific writing has become less distinct from the work preceding it.

Abstract: Eye-catching graphics, such as circular figure labels and word-scale visualizations, are increasingly being placed directly within long-form text paragraphs. Some research has claimed that inline visualizations can help readers understand data-rich passages more clearly. However, research in the science of reading calls into question the introduction of images within the flow of text. In this work, we conduct an exploratory study of eye movement in both the presence and absence of visual embellishments. Using a high-resolution eye-tracker (EyeLink Portable Duo), we observed small mean increases in vertical and cross-column saccade rates among six participants, with substantial variation among readers and no detected difference in comprehension accuracy. Mean subjective ratings for the data-light circular-glyph passage indicated it is more distracting than its unembellished comparison passage. These exploratory observations differ from prior findings and motivate a larger, fully crossed study of inline graphics.

Abstract: Accurate references are foundational to scholarly work, enabling verification, attribution, and systematic review. However, the rapid adoption of large language models has introduced a serious integrity concern: plausible-looking but fabricated citations. Although hallucinated references are widely discussed, their visibility within specific research communities remains unclear. We address this gap by examining reference integrity at key computing education venues using ACM Digital Library data. We analyze referencing trends across 24,751 computing education papers and compare them with the broader ACM corpus of more than 723,000 papers and 15 million references. We then examine reference lists from these venues, classify common bibliographic errors, and manually identify LLM-generated hallucinations containing verifiably false information, including impossible page ranges, invented titles, and misattributed authors. In 2025, hallucinated references appeared across five SIGCSE-sponsored or in-cooperation venues. At the Technical Symposium alone, verified hallucinated references increased from 3 in 2025 to 17 in 2026, appearing in 2.3\% of 2026 proceedings papers. Although still relatively rare for now, this growth poses an integrity risk our community should not ignore.

Abstract: Generalisations are common in scientific communication, even though they are semantically ambiguous. An automated method is needed to identify and categorise claims according to their level of generalisation, in order help detect an over-reliance on generalisations and possible misrepresentations of scientific findings. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of generalisations in the scientific domain, NLPGenX, which labels claims according to their level of generality and framing within the text. We operationalise this taxonomy with an LLM-powered framework, NLPGenA, that automatically classifies sentences from scientific articles into 5 different generalisation classes. We validate our framework with human annotators and use the framework to construct a large-scale dataset of NLP papers annotated according to generality, with auxiliary labels for hedging and vague descriptors (NLPGens). We use NLPGens to analyse the use of generalisations in NLP papers across multiple venues and subdomains, and to examine associations with citation counts, hedging, and vague descriptors.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in peer review at major AI conferences, yet novelty remains a persistent weak point. Existing benchmarks assess novelty as a single holistic score, making it difficult to diagnose which dimension a model misjudges or whether its evidence is faithful. We present NovGauge, a human-anchored benchmark for fine-grained novelty assessment diagnosis. The benchmark contains 619 paper pairs and 50 multi-paper sets, drawn from two expert sources: ICLR reviewer overlap claims and survey co-citations. Instances are independently labeled along three dimensions: task, problem, and method, capturing application goals, technical challenges, and solution approaches. We propose a cascading diagnostic pipeline that verifies per-dimension correctness, evidence grounding, and logical support. Evaluation of 18 LLMs shows hallucination rates ranging from 0% to 39% across dimensions, and among non-hallucinated correct-positive judgments, over 70% cite evidence fails to logically support the stated reason. The best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves 43-72% Verified F1 across dimensions, while most models retain less than half of their raw F1 after faithfulness verification. These results suggest that current LLMs remain far from reliable scientific novelty assessment, particularly when correctness is conditioned on faithful evidence grounding.