Have Large Language Models Enhanced the Way Civil & Environmental Engineers Write? A Quantitative Analysis of Scholarly Communication over 25 Years
arXiv:2602.03864v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly emerged in civil and environmental engineering (CEE) research, education, and practice as a tool for project ideation, execution, and communication. However, it is unknown how prevalent LLM adoption is across CEE scholarship and whether it meaningfully alters research prose. Inspired by a recent analysis of biomedical abstracts, this study adapts a vocabulary-based frequency-shift methodology to estimate the incidence of LLM-written abstracts in the field of CEE scholarship using 149,452 abstracts published by the American Society of Civil Engineers from 2000 through 2025 as the representative corpus. By quantifying departures from recent vocabulary trends, we estimate 15% and 26% of abstracts published in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Prior to the introduction of LLMs in 2022, CEE publications exhibit long-term trends toward increasing numbers of authors, longer abstracts and sentences, greater use of segmenting punctuation, higher required reading levels, and a shift toward active, first-person verb constructions. Beginning around 2023, however, the frequencies of many excess style words (e.g., enhance) dramatically depart from their historic trajectories, and correspondingly, departures in multiple semantic properties are observed. When abstracts classified as likely LLM-written are isolated, these departures are shown to be largely attributable to LLM-generated text. These abstracts exhibit systematic shifts, including increased word choice diversity, more commas, increased complexity, decreased use of passive constructions, and less qualifying language commonly used to convey uncertainty, such that prose is generally more segmented, syntactically complex, and assertive. Together these findings provide the first large-scale, data-driven assessment of LLM use and effect on CEE scholarly writing.
