I read the article by Gemma Conroy (in Nature) on how scientists used ChatGPT to generate an entire research paper from scratch. I was both amused and annoyed when I saw this report. Having started publishing research papers in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate medical student, this gave me a chance to reflect on how a lot has changed during the last 50 years.
When I started my journey in publishing research papers, there was no PubMed or Google, why, there were no 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 have been published several months ago as the journals were being 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. A few would be available at the National Medical Library at Delhi, but it would mean a trip to Delhi to get the references, and that was not cheap. Moreover, after spending a day or two browsing through the journals, one would have to request for copies of the articles, which could take a few weeks as they had to be photocopied and sent to Chennai.
Regarding the writing of the article itself, since there were no computers, one had to write them by hand and then get it typed out on a manual typewriter. One had to maintain a list of references separately and include them in the article as the paper progressed. By the 1980s, computers had arrived which made the typing of articles much easier. With the advent of PubMed and Google, life became much easier for the researcher, for, at the touch of a button, one could at least get the abstracts of all relevant articles published anywhere in the world. It still meant that one would have to write the articles oneself.
