Can AI replace humans in editing, revision, and polishing in research writing?
The short answer is NO. True editing, revision, and polishing in research writing remains a fundamentally human-centric process. On the other hand, text polishing with AI saves the author’s time contributing to a cleaner and more consistent draft. Therefore, AI has become an indispensable collaborator. The human’s role in the writing process has shifted from doing all the manual labor to being a strategic director, verifier, and quality controller.
What Can AI Do as an Editing Assistant?
AI excels at monotonous and time-consuming work that bores many humans. AI can automate mechanical, repetitive, and rule-based aspects of editing.
Surface-Level Corrections: AI can be superb at spotting spelling, grammar, punctuation, and basic syntax errors. Now tools, like Grammarly, are AI-powered and go beyond simple rules to suggest improvements in clarity and conciseness.
Consistency Checks: AI can ensure consistency in terminology, formatting (e.g., heading styles, number formatting), and the citation style (e.g., APA, MLA) throughout a document.
Basic Clarity and Readability: AI can detect overly long sentences and overloaded passive constructions, coming up with simpler alternatives. What it can also provide is the readability score.
Structural Analysis: AI can analyze the overall text structure to notify the author if the flow of arguments could be improved.
Summarization: AI can summarize so that the author can immediately see if they managed to clearly communicate the key points in their text.
The short answer is NO. True editing, revision, and polishing in research writing remains a fundamentally human-centric process. On the other hand, text polishing with AI saves the author’s time contributing to a cleaner and more consistent draft. Therefore, AI has become an indispensable collaborator. The human’s role in the writing process has shifted from doing all the manual labor to being a strategic director, verifier, and quality controller.
What Can AI Do as an Editing Assistant?
AI excels at monotonous and time-consuming work that bores many humans. AI can automate mechanical, repetitive, and rule-based aspects of editing.
Surface-Level Corrections: AI can be superb at spotting spelling, grammar, punctuation, and basic syntax errors. Now tools, like Grammarly, are AI-powered and go beyond simple rules to suggest improvements in clarity and conciseness.
Consistency Checks: AI can ensure consistency in terminology, formatting (e.g., heading styles, number formatting), and the citation style (e.g., APA, MLA) throughout a document.
Basic Clarity and Readability: AI can detect overly long sentences and overloaded passive constructions, coming up with simpler alternatives. What it can also provide is the readability score.
Structural Analysis: AI can analyze the overall text structure to notify the author if the flow of arguments could be improved.
Summarization: AI can summarize so that the author can immediately see if they managed to clearly communicate the key points in their text.
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Does science still speak for itself and allocate hundreds of science-hungry followers?
The focus has shifted from "Publish or Perish" to "Promote or Perish". A paper published in a top journal can get lost without social media attention compared to a supposedly lesser paper that goes "viral" when promoted at platforms like Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. To reach out to their audience, researchers are expected to become academic influencers with developed skills in science communication.
How is this connected to academic writing?
The conventional approach to writing academic texts in a dry, impersonal, and passive-voice-heavy style is challenged. Moreover, it is seen as a barrier to the impact. The audience is seeking more accessible writing with plain language summaries, graphical abstracts, and a narrative-driven structure that tells the "story" of research. Researchers need to learn the new writing skills that would be typically associated with journalism or popular science.
For example, these discoveries might not have been overlooked if they became timely visible.
The focus has shifted from "Publish or Perish" to "Promote or Perish". A paper published in a top journal can get lost without social media attention compared to a supposedly lesser paper that goes "viral" when promoted at platforms like Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. To reach out to their audience, researchers are expected to become academic influencers with developed skills in science communication.
How is this connected to academic writing?
The conventional approach to writing academic texts in a dry, impersonal, and passive-voice-heavy style is challenged. Moreover, it is seen as a barrier to the impact. The audience is seeking more accessible writing with plain language summaries, graphical abstracts, and a narrative-driven structure that tells the "story" of research. Researchers need to learn the new writing skills that would be typically associated with journalism or popular science.
For example, these discoveries might not have been overlooked if they became timely visible.
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Well, we are here!
AI has developed a recognizable accent in academic writing. This is definitely not about pronunciation, but about those subtle patterns in word choice, sentence structure, and rhetorical flow that can signal a text is AI generated rather than human written. AI training on a massive corpus of existing text results in producing an averaged or statistically likely academic prose.
AI has developed a recognizable accent in academic writing. This is definitely not about pronunciation, but about those subtle patterns in word choice, sentence structure, and rhetorical flow that can signal a text is AI generated rather than human written. AI training on a massive corpus of existing text results in producing an averaged or statistically likely academic prose.
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Title
The сurrent tsunami of journal publications requires researchers to invent informative and easy-to-understand titles if they want their work to be read and cited by their colleagues. This approach to titles is increasingly important if authors want to attract lay readers, who might lack an understanding of acronyms or field-specific terminology. Clearly formulated article titles in plain language may well enhance readability and subsequent shareability, bridging the gap between academic and general audiences.
To make evidence-based knowledge more available for disseminating, it is suggested to use declarative or informative titles that present the main findings or results of the research. As they are more direct, they make research to be more possible shared in social media.
Examples
Come rain or come shine, the species richness will decline in the Moroccan mountains
Graphene combines computer logic and memory in a single device
Meta’s AI translation model embraces overlooked languages
Father’s diet influences son’s metabolic health through sperm RNA
If you do decide to use a declarative title and it is not prohibited by the journal, bear the following in mind:
✔️ Effective titles are typically 10–15 words long
✔️ Use a subject-verb structure in your title
✔️ Be very careful about overstating findings
The сurrent tsunami of journal publications requires researchers to invent informative and easy-to-understand titles if they want their work to be read and cited by their colleagues. This approach to titles is increasingly important if authors want to attract lay readers, who might lack an understanding of acronyms or field-specific terminology. Clearly formulated article titles in plain language may well enhance readability and subsequent shareability, bridging the gap between academic and general audiences.
To make evidence-based knowledge more available for disseminating, it is suggested to use declarative or informative titles that present the main findings or results of the research. As they are more direct, they make research to be more possible shared in social media.
Examples
Come rain or come shine, the species richness will decline in the Moroccan mountains
Graphene combines computer logic and memory in a single device
Meta’s AI translation model embraces overlooked languages
Father’s diet influences son’s metabolic health through sperm RNA
If you do decide to use a declarative title and it is not prohibited by the journal, bear the following in mind:
✔️ Effective titles are typically 10–15 words long
✔️ Use a subject-verb structure in your title
✔️ Be very careful about overstating findings
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