I read an article by Gemma Conroy on how scientists used ChatGPT to generate an entire research paper from scratch and it left me both amused and annoyed. Having started publishing research papers in the 1970s as an undergraduate medical student, I reflected on how much things had changed during the past 50 years.
When I started my journey in publishing research papers, there was no PubMed or Google — why, there were not even computers! One had to go to the medical college library which, if one was lucky, would have a journal relevant to one’s topic but the articles would be those published several months ago, as in those days, journals were sent by surface mail from abroad.
One had to go through articles manually, look up the references at the end of the article, tabulate the cross references, make a list of relevant papers needed and then start the process of trying to get those articles.
