Appliances of Generative AI-Powered Language Tools in Academic Writing: A Scoping Review

Introduction: Academic writing is getting through a transformative shift with the advent of the generative AI-powered tools in 2022. It spurred research in the emerging field that focus on appliances of AI-powered tools in academic writing. As the AI technologies are changing fast, a regular synthesis of new knowledge needs revisiting. Though there are scoping and systematic reviews of some sub-fields, the present review aims to aims to set the scope of the research field of research on GenAI appliances in academic writing. Method: The review adhered to the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews, and the PPC framework. The eligibility criteria include problem, concept, context, language, subject area, types of sources, database (Scopus), and period (2023-2024). Results: The three clusters set for the reviewed 44 publications included (1) AI in enhancing academic writing; (2) AI challenges in academic writing; (3) authorship and integrity. The potential of AI language tools embraces many functions (text generation, proofreading, editing, text annotation, paraphrasing and translation) and provides for assistance in research and academic writing, offers strategies for hybrid AI-powered writing of various assignments and genres and improvements in writing quality. Language GenAI-powered tools are also studied as a feedback tool. The challenges and concerns related to the appliances of such tools range from authorship and integrity to overreliance on such tools, misleading or false generated content, inaccurate referencing, inability to generate author’s voice. The review findings are in compliance with the emerging trends outlined in the previous publications, though more publications focus on the mechanisms of integrating the tools in AI-hybrid writing in various contexts. The discourse on challenges is migrating to the revisiting the concepts of authorship and originality of Gen AI-generated content. Conclusion: The directions of research have shown some re-focusing, with new inputs and new focuses in the field. The transformation of academic writing is accelerating, with new strategies wrought in the academia to face the challenges and rethinking of the basic concepts to meet the shift. Further regular syntheses of knowledge are essential, including more reviews of all already existent and emerging sub-fields. © 2024 National Research University, Higher School of Econoimics. All rights reserved.