Content planner and copywriter at TextPulse. Sara runs the blog day to day, from planning and drafting through to publishing. She writes the practical guides: clear explanations of academic writing problems, aimed at the person who actually has to hand something in.
Most course policies do not give AI a single yes or no. They sort it into three tiers, banned, disclosed, or free, and the tier that actually matters is decided by one line: whether a tool edited what a student already thought, or generated the thinking itself.
ICMJE and COPE both say no, and neither stops there. Their authorship rules explain exactly which two obligations a language model cannot meet, and what happened to the handful of 2023 papers that tried crediting ChatGPT anyway.
Six ready-to-use AI disclosure statement templates: one each for language editing, literature search assistance, code generation, data analysis, image generation, and no AI used at all. Replace the brackets and go.
A DOI is a persistent identifier, not a dressed-up URL, and APA and MLA disagree about what replaces it when a source does not have one. Here is what a DOI actually is, how to check before assuming a source lacks one, and the exact rule each style applies when it is missing.
A readability formula counts syllables and sentence length, nothing else. That is why a precise methods paragraph scores as difficult and a vague one scores as easy. What a reader in the field actually needs is a different test entirely.
Where you place an AI disclosure statement, what it has to name, and what happens if a journal finds it missing afterward: the mechanics of disclosing AI use in a journal article, publisher by publisher.