Russia Learned to Check Scientific Texts for Academic Integrity Last Year
The new development is designed to help safeguard academic integrity in the age of AI.
2025 marked a turning point for scientific publishing in Russia. As generative models spread rapidly, a practical question moved to the forefront: how to distinguish independent scholarly work from text produced by an algorithm?
Russian developers offered an answer by creating new tools to analyze and verify content for signs of AI-generated text.
AI Is Not a Scientist Yet
One of the year’s key developments was the AINL-Eval 2025 project, an open research shared-task initiative focused on detecting automatically generated abstracts and fragments of scientific papers.
Russian research teams proposed datasets, evaluation methodologies, and unified metrics. Participants compared their approaches to identifying texts produced by language models in a real academic environment.
More Than Plagiarism Detection
The task turned out to be more complex than conventional plagiarism checks. Modern models do not copy sources verbatim. Instead, they generate coherent, seemingly correct text. As a result, the focus shifted toward statistical signals, stylistic features, and argument structure. Researchers analyzed how terms are distributed across a text, the logic of sentence construction, and patterns of academic language. This made it possible to identify machine-generated content even when the text appeared polished and formally sound.
Accessible to the Academic Community
The results of AINL-Eval 2025, including preprints published on arXiv, were released as open access. This made the findings available to universities, academic journals, and research centers. The tools can be used in peer review, dissertation checks, and large-scale analysis of scientific publications.
Not Anti-AI
Importantly, the project is not aimed at opposing AI as a tool. Its goal is to clarify where the line lies between assisting a researcher and substituting genuine scientific work. In 2025, Russia took a notable step toward establishing clear, technology-driven standards for academic integrity.
