Yixuan Liu, Lin Chen, Zhuoqi Liu +2cs.DL cs.CL cs.CY cs.SI
Scientific citations carry rhetorical intent. Scholars may cite prior work positively (supporting), negatively (contrasting), or neutrally (mentioning). As large language models (LLMs) increasingly assist scientific writing, whether they reproduce citations with the same rhetorical intent as humans remains unclear. We introduce a masked-citation task to compare human and LLM-generated citation behavior. For each citation context, an LLM generates a replacement citation sentence, producing a counterfactual corpus directly comparable to human citation. We analyze what, whom, and how models cite, using an LLM-as-a-judge to classify citation intent and a 20-million-edge coauthorship network to measure social distance between cited authors. Across six popular LLMs and 1,746 top NLP conference papers (63k+ contexts, 132k+ citations), three patterns emerge: (1) Compared with human citation, LLMs cite significantly less critically; (2) LLMs over-cite popular and older papers, a tendency amplified for contrasting citations where human writing more often draws on recent, niche work; (3) Whereas humans often cite within their close social network, especially for supporting citations, LLMs tend to draw on more socially distant authors. Together, these differences are double-edged: LLM citation reaches beyond a scholar's close collaborators while being less critical and amplifying visibility bias, reshaping the rhetoric and reach of scientific citation.
Computational resources are increasingly central to NLP research, but how closely reported GPU capability aligns with scholarly impact remains unclear. We analyze 13,921 ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL main-conference papers published between 2020 and 2025, using GPU resources as our operational measure of computational resources. From full texts, we extract GPU models and counts, standardize each paper's largest reported configuration into a comparable hardware-capability measure, and link these data to citation, award, topic, and institutional metadata. GPU reporting became more common but remained incomplete, while reported capability increased mainly through newer hardware generations and medium-scale multi-GPU configurations. Resource concentration substantially exceeded impact concentration: the annual top 20% of GPU-quantifiable papers accounted for 83.9%-89.9% of reported GPU capability, but only 27%-32% of citations and 20%-33% of paper awards. In adjusted models, a tenfold increase in aggregate reported GPU capability was associated with a 3.52-percentage-point increase in within-NLP topic-year citation percentile, but increased model R^2 by only 0.0042. GPU count showed more consistent positive associations with citation and award outcomes than newer hardware generation. Overall, reported GPU resources are associated with scholarly impact but provide little standalone explanation of research influence.
Sina Alemohammad, Denghui Zhang, Bolong Tang +5cs.DL cs.AI
As language models move from drafting prose to running literature-search agents with tool calls, fabricated references are becoming easier to catch and constrain. The harder failure begins after every candidate is real: different models may still select the same narrow subset, producing citation monoculture without any single citation being wrong. We isolate this effect on 120 real papers. Eleven models from three vendors choose at most ten papers from uniformly random panels of thirty, with real titles and abstracts but fabricated authors, reassigned years, and hidden venues and citation counts. Each run is compared with indifferent selection on the same panel and realized budget. All eleven models concentrate sharply: the top decile receives 23.3-30.2% of citations against 15.6% under the null, one component explains 68-73% of variation across their preference maps, and cross-vendor agreement nearly matches within-vendor agreement. Formalizing the task as fixed-budget subset selection, we turn these patterns into identifiable mechanisms: an exchangeability bound rejects a mapless selector for every model, a spectral decomposition explains why the best cross-fitted mixture still retains 55% of the excess, and a rarity theorem predicts the recursive competition effect we verify within panels. Controlled paraphrase, content-slot crossover, and design resampling attribute about 90% of GPT-5 mini's map variance to paper content. Eight domain experts selecting from the same blinded panels under the same cap show no comparable shared preference, while model concentration persists in selection-only mode. Even when every reference is real and every paper is equally visible, current language models impose a common content-level filter on scientific attention. Equalizing retrieval or mixing vendors is therefore insufficient; the shared preference map itself must be changed.
The Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (BRACIS) is the main national venue for Artificial Intelligence research in Brazil, hosted by the Brazilian Computer Society since 2012 and publishing work from institutions across the country. Across eleven years, from 2015 to 2025, we build a per-paper record of all 1,066 accepted papers from DBLP metadata, 6,765 Google Scholar citations, and the paper full texts, and use it to ask what BRACIS publishes, who publishes it, and which work gets cited. Large Language Model research grows from zero before 2020 to 19% of papers in 2024, on top of a base of Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Optimization work. The community is hourglass-shaped: 80.5% of 2,623 authors appear in a single edition, while institutions return at nearly three times the author rate. Citations are heavily concentrated, with the top 1% of papers carrying 27% of the total. Openness practices have grown, with artifact release rising from 8.9% of papers in 2015 to 57.3% in 2023, and we find a notable correlation between having an arXiv preprint and higher citation counts. Since proceedings sit behind IEEE and Springer paywalls and only 7.4% of papers have a preprint, most BRACIS work is hard to reach for readers without institutional access.
Prior work on AI brand visibility measures the firm: does a model recommend a company, and does that track its reputation. This study asks the question one level down, in categories where the buyer picks a person. It issued 2,400 grounded API calls in one two-hour window on 24 July 2026: 120 buyer-intent prompts, four models (GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Perplexity Sonar Pro, Grok 4.5), five iterations each, four European markets and five query languages. Every response was coded for whether it named an individual professional, by a rule cascade that never consults a roster and that drops detections resolving to a same-named American city (precision 96.9%, recall 61.7%, so every rate below is a lower bound). All inference corrects for clustering within prompt: intraclass correlation 0.258, effective n 407 against a nominal 2,400. Models named an individual in 25.8% of responses. Category dominates: real estate 35.4% and car dealerships 32.9% against insurance 9.1% (chi-square 159.3, p = 5.8e-8 after correction). Models differ four-fold, from Grok 38.0% to Gemini 9.3%. Citation type predicts naming and citation volume does not: naming responses cite the individual's own site 2.6 points more often (95% CI +1.4 to +3.9) and category portals 4.3 points more often, and cite firm-owned pages at the same rate (44.1% against 45.5%). On nine matched translation pairs, English prompts named an individual in 36.7% of responses against 15.6% for the same question in the local language (OR 3.14, clustered p = 0.074, so the direction is clear and the design cannot close it). A 939-person roster built from public LinkedIn search matched 128 of 27,293 name-shaped mentions (0.47%), 26 of the 939 people were ever named, and the roster-derived rates of 0.0% to 25.4% measure that overlap. Roster-based measurement of individual AI visibility sees a small and unrepresentative slice of what models do.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has traditionally been published in its core disciplinary venues like ACL. However, advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a blurring of the disciplinary lines between NLP and general Machine Learning (ML), with authors regularly publishing in venues from both fields. Here, we ask whether the disciplinary center of gravity is shifting. Using NLP research published from 2010 to 2026 and studies of both established and new authors, we find that a migration is taking place. First, comparing the pre- and post-LLM eras, established authors lost 19.2pp of share at flagship *ACL main-conference tracks while gaining 14.8pp in the newer Findings tracks, and general ML venues rose 8.6pp, even when adjusting for parallel growth in the fields. Second, among newer authors who debut with at least three first-author NLP-topic papers, the share whose work appears mostly at *ACL venues fell from 84% (2019) to 74% (2024), while the share appearing mostly at general ML venues rose from 5% to 21%. Using causal inference techniques, we estimate that these general ML venues confer a significant citation premium, which influences venue selection. Together, these results point to a significant shift in where NLP research is published.
Citation counts remain the dominant metric for assessing research impact, yet they suffer from well-documented limitations: temporal lag, disciplinary bias, and Matthew effects. Here we propose LLM-Metrics, a research-impact assessment metric derived from the parametric memory of large language models (LLMs). The central hypothesis is that high-impact papers receive greater exposure in the academic community, that this exposure enters LLM training data in textual form, and that models consequently form stronger parametric memory of these papers. We designed four types of multiple-choice probes, covering title recognition, author recognition, method recognition, and venue recognition, and evaluated 549 computer science papers published in 2023-2024 across 17 LLMs spanning 0.5B to 72B parameters from six vendors. Of the 17 models, 15 produced positive predictions, 9 of which were significant at p less than 0.05, with an overall Spearman correlation of rho = 0.1495 and p = 0.0004 against citation counts. Three additional findings support the proposed mechanism. First, the predictive signal was stronger for 2024 papers, rho = 0.1880, whose citation counts were near zero at model-training time, reducing the plausibility of a simple reverse-causality explanation. Second, author-recognition probes showed the strongest discriminative power, consistent with an exposure-driven memory mechanism. Third, model scale and predictive power were non-monotonic: a 3B-parameter model, Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, with rho = 0.1829, outperformed most larger models, supporting a selective-memory hypothesis in which the limited capacity of smaller models can serve as an effective information filter. LLM-Metrics offers a real-time, cross-disciplinary, citation-independent paradigm for research assessment.