  The use of ChatGPT and similar Large Language Model (LLM) tools in scholarly
communication and academic publishing has been widely discussed since they
became easily accessible to a general audience in late 2022. This study uses
keywords known to be disproportionately present in LLM-generated text to
provide an overall estimate for the prevalence of LLM-assisted writing in the
scholarly literature. For the publishing year 2023, it is found that several of
those keywords show a distinctive and disproportionate increase in their
prevalence, individually and in combination. It is estimated that at least
60,000 papers (slightly over 1% of all articles) were LLM-assisted, though this
number could be extended and refined by analysis of other characteristics of
the papers or by identification of further indicative keywords.
