India, Nov. 7 -- These days, so much prose online is generic. There are telltale signs in a flattening of voice, sameness of language, and oddly similar punctuation. It's in identical LinkedIn posts across profiles and in similar-sounding restaurant and hotel reviews online. It's quite easy to suspect that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used in writing these platitudes. And now we have hard evidence that AI is seeping into science journals at an alarming rate.

A Spanish malaria researcher, Carlos Chaccour, recently published a clinical trial on using ivermectin to control mosquito-borne infections. Two days later, The New England Journal of Medicine received a sharply worded letter accusing him of ignoring key research. There was ...