“Academic Slop”: Definition and Bibliometric Exploration of Its Relationship to AI Tools

Academic publishing has many quality-control mechanisms to avoid low-quality work being published. Yet, poor quality scholarship has historically found its way into print, and fluent-sounding artificial intelligence (AI) outputs are increasingly filling the literature at an unprecedented rate. In this article, we offer a definition of “academic slop”—both AI slop and human sloppiness alike—and conduct a Scopus-based bibliometric analysis on its relationship to AI tools, extending the debate recently covered in this journal on the topic (Giray et al.; DOI: 10.1080/10875301.2026.2637526). 16 documents were found on this emerging topic.