Department of Management Seminars

Artificial intelligence is changing how research is written, submitted, reviewed, and evaluated. But is it helping academia produce better knowledge, or simply more of it?

Associate Professor of Management Alex Murray will present findings from “More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review,” coauthored with Claudine Gartenberg, Sharique Hasan, and Lamar Pierce and forthcoming in Organization Science.

As members of the AI Task Force for Organization Science, Murray and his coauthors examined how AI has affected submissions and peer reviews at a major academic journal. Their analysis found that submission volume has risen 42 percent since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, while writing quality has declined. The rise in AI-generated writing accounts for nearly all of these trends. The team also found that AI-generated writing is appearing more frequently in peer reviews, where it is associated with lower writing quality and less topical diversity than human-generated reviews. To their knowledge, Organization Science is the first journal to report these early impacts of AI in the review process.

The findings point to a larger question for universities, journals, and researchers across disciplines: When AI collides with publish-or-perish incentives, how can academic institutions encourage deeper insight, stronger judgment, and more meaningful research rather than simply higher output?

Murray’s talk will explore what these early signals reveal about the future of peer review, the role of human expertise, and the institutional changes that may be needed for AI to become a true engine of research innovation.

Read more about the research in Nature.