LLM-Generated or Human-Written? Comparing Review and Non-Review Papers on ArXiv

📅 2026-01-19
🏛️ arXiv.org
📈 Citations: 3
Influential: 0
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📝 Abstract
ArXiv recently prohibited the upload of unpublished review papers to its servers in the Computer Science domain, citing a high prevalence of LLM-generated content in these categories. However, this decision was not accompanied by quantitative evidence. In this work, we investigate this claim by measuring the proportion of LLM-generated content in review vs. non-review research papers in recent years. Using two high-quality detection methods, we find a substantial increase in LLM-generated content across both review and non-review papers, with a higher prevalence in review papers. However, when considering the number of LLM-generated papers published in each category, the estimates of non-review LLM-generated papers are almost six times higher. Furthermore, we find that this policy will affect papers in certain domains far more than others, with the CS subdiscipline Computers&Society potentially facing cuts of 50%. Our analysis provides an evidence-based framework for evaluating such policy decisions, and we release our code to facilitate future investigations at: https://github.com/yanaiela/llm-review-arxiv.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

LLM-generated content
review papers
non-review papers
ArXiv
Computer Science
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

LLM-generated content
review papers
non-review papers
policy impact
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