Many academic researchers publish only a handful of papers each year, seeking scientific discoveries or solutions to everyday problems facing businesses and government agencies. Some especially busy professors might publish a dozen or more studies a year.
Then there’s the curious case of Nicholas Polson.
The University of Chicago statistician has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers and as many as 14 books released this year, unleashing speculation on the internet about whether he used artificial intelligence to inflate his production without disclosing the assistance.
The controversy highlights a growing concern in academia about whether some researchers could rely too heavily on AI to churn out a wave of papers that overwhelms journals charged with vetting the work.
“There’s going to be a flood of poor-quality research that the system is not equipped right now to handle,” said Claudine Gartenberg, senior editor for an academic journal called Organization Science, which publishes peer-reviewed studies on organizations, referring to research submissions in general.
Before AI, researchers noted that flawed or fraudulent studies can create significant problems when they slip through the cracks, misleading the public and policymakers alike.
A flawed 1998 paper in The Lancet journal suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The paper, which was later retracted, helped fuel concerns about the safety of vaccines and drive down vaccination rates. Subsequent studies found no link to autism.
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Separately, now-discredited cancer studies led Duke University researchers two decades ago to use questionable genetic tests to help select treatments for patients enrolled in clinical trials.
The online platform where Polson posted his papers said it removed 257 of his works over the past month after his surge in releases. Critics have not accused Polson of fraud, but have raised questions about whether Polson properly disclosed his use of AI and whether it’s even possible to produce that many high-quality papers in so short a span.
Polson acknowledged in an email to The Post that he used AI to help produce the work, but did not say whether he disclosed the use of AI in any of the papers he published.
Most of Polson’s papers focus on advanced statistics and mathematics, though some touch on topics of broader interest. Those include efforts to understand the financial pressures that could lead to cuts in Social Security and other benefit programs, why players excel at certain strategic games like chess, and how TikTok serves up certain videos that engage viewers without informing them.
University of Central Arkansas economist Jeremy Horpedahl was stunned by Polson’s productivity.
“Two hundred-plus papers in nine months is both unheard of and unbelievable,” he said.
The questions about the papers were so significant that SSRN, the platform Polson used to share the research papers, took down the articles over the past month and froze the accounts used to post the works.
Polson suggested the complaints stemmed from jealousy.
“Clearly AI makes a productive researcher far more productive,” he wrote in an email to The Post.
Though many other researchers agree that AI can help scholars speed up mundane tasks, such as tracking down previous research, some warn it could also inadvertently pollute the research pipeline with plagiarism, redundant works, fabricated citations and critical errors in data and analysis.
One review this year of 3,200 peer-reviewed papers found 2 percent contained at least one reference that couldn’t be verified. A separate study of papers accepted by several conferences related to AI found more than 300 contained at least one nonexistent citation.
And as AI makes it possible for scholars to produce more studies, some worry the volume could overwhelm editors and reviewers charged with screening the material and spotting problems.
Gartenberg, the senior editor for Organization Science, estimated the number of submissions for her publication has doubled since ChatGPT first became available in 2022. She said its sister publications have also seen increases. And a major academic publisher, Elsevier, reported submissions to its journals jumped about 68 percent from 2021 to 2025.
“The editors are getting overwhelmed,” said Gartenberg, who is also a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Gartenberg said she’s also seen some reviewers use AI to review submissions, reducing the quality of the screening process.
The controversy also comes at a time when retractions have been on the rise and many researchers have faced accusations of bias from politicians.
Gartenberg worries shoddy AI papers could further erode trust in the peer-review process and reduce the impact of discoveries that offer potential solutions to serious problems.
“I think the trust in peer review is going to go down,” she said. “If everybody assumes that any paper could be that MMR paper [that was retracted], then trust in the process itself goes away.”
Gartenberg said she especially worries that problems with the data or analysis that might be hard for editors to spot could slip through.
Polson’s papers, meanwhile, stood out because of the sheer number of pieces he released this year.
“Two hundred in a year is obviously highly unusual,” said UCLA management professor Auyon Siddiq, one of the first to notice the wave of articles. “It’s not only the volume, but the diversity of topics and how they differ from his past work.”
There’s a chaired, full professor at UChicago who has put out *200* papers in 2026 alone. And at least one has been submitted to a journal (so potentially many more). They don’t all cite each other though — rookie mistake. https://t.co/JiJ69OtFNv pic.twitter.com/x0j81um2Y7
— Auyon Siddiq (@auyonymous) August 18, 2026
SSRN, a platform for researchers to share papers, including those that have yet to undergo peer review and appear in academic journals, generally requires researchers to describe their use of AI. But several academics said they did not see any such disclosure in the Polson papers they saw.
The platform offered another reason, however, for removing Polson’s articles and blocking his accounts from further submissions.
“While it is true that many of those papers did not include an AI disclosure, that was not the primary concern,” a spokesperson said. “The more significant issue was the unusual submission activity.”
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, said he didn’t read all of Polson’s papers. But he didn’t see anything valuable in an 80-page paper Polson co-wrote that proposed a unified theory for human connection.
“It didn’t make much sense, although you could see how a chatbot could write chunks of it,” he said.
Gelman said he was puzzled about what would motivate an established professor at a well-known business school to pump out so many articles with AI.
“People talk about academic cheating and all that, but he has nothing to gain from it,” Gelman said. “He’s tenured.”
Polson, a professor in the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, insists he produced the papers with hard work on problems he was interested in. He said AI just helped him move faster.
“Much of grunt work is made way easier,” Polson said.
He said he guessed the complaints were motivated by “envy and a desire to poach my process. But who knows?”
Polson said many of the critics did not appear to have actually read his full works, but did not respond to questions about the lack of AI disclosures on many of the pieces.
In addition to releasing the academic papers, Polson is also scheduled to teach two business classes at the University of Chicago this fall. And his name appeared on 14 book titles published so far this year with two more scheduled for coming months, according to listings on Amazon.
Polson did not respond to messages asking him to confirm all the books are his. All but two of the titles either mention his university or list a co-author he has collaborated with on his research papers.
The controversy also comes at a time when the University of Chicago has been trying to limit students’ use of devices in certain foundational classes to help ensure they engage with course materials and each otherand do not rely on AI. The school did not respond to questions about whether it requires faculty to disclose their use of AI or whether it plans its own investigation of Polson’s publications this year.
At the same time, many academics credit AI with helping researchers move faster.
Gartenberg, the Organization Science editor, said she uses AI herself to help with routine tasks and do early exploration of data, despite her concerns that it has also fueled flawed papers by others. And she’s hopeful new AI tools could eventually help editors detect faulty data or analysis before the works are published.
“I just think it’s really imperative that we grasp that the world has changed,” she said.
The post Using AI, a professor wrote 200 papers this year. Researchers are alarmed. appeared first on Washington Post.
