When AI Meets Science: Research Diversity, Interdisciplinarity, Visibility, and Retractions across Disciplines in a Global Surge

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 227 million scholarly works to understand AI's adoption in science, revealing growth patterns, limited epistemological shifts, and disparities across countries, with implications for research practices and ethics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AI-assisted semantic classification pipeline to distinguish AI adoption from engagement, providing comprehensive insights across disciplines and geographies.

Findings

AI adoption grew exponentially after 2015 but shows limited epistemological change.

AI-supported research is concentrated in specific topics with ties to computer science.

AI research has higher retraction rates and citation premiums than non-AI research.

Abstract

The extent to which Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can trigger generalized paradigm shifts in science is unclear. Although these technologies have revolutionized data collection and analysis in specific fields, their overall impact depends on the scope and ways of adoption. We analyze over 227 million scholarly works from the OpenAlex collection (1960-2024) spanning four scientific domains and 46 fields. To distinguish the use of AI as research method (AI adoption) from mentioning AI-related terms (AI engagement), we developed a two-step AI-assisted semantic classification pipeline, validated through human coding of 911 abstracts and a robustness check on 348,000 full-text articles (PLOS One). We document differences in the timing and extent of AI adoption across domains, with generalized exponential growth after 2015. The transformative nature of this growth, however, is less apparent. AI-supported research is confined to a few topics with strong ties to Computer Science and conventional statistical frameworks, suggesting limited epistemological transformation. It is also associated with an unwarranted citation premium and substantially higher retraction rates than non-AI-supported. Geographically, while wealthy countries lead in AI publications per capita, global South countries in a belt from Indonesia to Algeria lead in AI adoption relative to their national output, signaling a distinctive resource concentration pattern. The transformative capacity of AI in science thus remains untapped, and its rapid adoption underlines challenges in research openness, transparency, reproducibility, and ethics. We discuss how best research practices could boost the benefits of AI adoption and highlight areas that warrant closer scrutiny.