A tenured University of Chicago statistician who published more than 200 academic papers in under a year has had all of them stripped from a major research repository, after the platform froze the accounts used to upload his work. Nicholas Polson, the Robert Law, Jr. Professor of Econometrics and Statistics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, saw 253 papers he wrote or co-wrote within the past year pulled from SSRN, according to reporting cited by The Washington Post.
SSRN, the preprint repository operated by academic publisher Elsevier, cited unusual submission activity as the main reason for its action, according to The College Fix. The platform froze accounts tied to Polson's name as well as removing the papers. Polson did not appear in SSRN search results when reporters checked. Unlike journal articles, SSRN preprints can be posted without peer review or formal publication, allowing researchers to share work and seek early feedback.
The volume was a sharp break from Polson's prior publication record: he published 12 papers in 2016, 14 in 2017 and 10 in 2018. UCLA Anderson School of Management professor Auyon Siddiq was among those who flagged the 2026 output publicly in mid-August, pointing to both its scale and its departure from Polson's usual research focus, according to ScienceNet.
From Econometrics to Chess, TikTok and Spirituality
Polson built his academic reputation in econometrics and statistics, where he has taught since 1991 after earning his doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 1988. His 2026 preprints wandered far from that lane, touching on chess move valuation, TikTok recommendation algorithms, Social Security funding pressures, and an 80-page manuscript titled The Theories of Human Connection.
Polson acknowledged using AI in an interview with The Washington Post, saying it makes the “grunt work easier” and can make a productive researcher more productive. He did not disclose AI use in the papers he posted on SSRN this year, although the platform requires scholars to disclose such use. Polson defended the quality of his writing and said he works hard to produce research. He also suggested critics might be envious and want to poach his process, linking that claim to one of the 14 books he published this year, The Green-Eyed Animal: Sexual Jealousy.
Disclosure rules and preprint screening vary
There is no single rule established by these examples for disclosing generative AI use. APA Journals, for instance, requires authors to disclose and cite generative AI used to draft a manuscript for an APA publication, illustrating that requirements are publisher-specific, according to APA Journals. This example does not establish a fieldwide timeline of policy changes since 2023. Separately, arXiv's moderation policy limits each author to two new submissions per calendar month and three active submissions. That is an arXiv rule, not evidence about SSRN's policies or its reasons for acting in Polson's case.
Vadim Sokolov, an associate professor of systems engineering at George Mason University who co-authored more than 100 of Polson's 2026 preprints, defended the collaboration on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, the blog run by Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman. Sokolov argued that the papers grew from research ideas developed before AI and that chatbot tools helped draft them, describing the technology as an accelerant rather than the source of the ideas.
Gelman Raises the Alarm, Then Organizes Resistance
Gelman told The College Fix that his concern was the quality of the research, not the use of chatbots itself; he said he knows colleagues who use chatbot-generated code and produce excellent work. He warned that AI tools can facilitate the production and promotion of what he called “slop.”
Gelman also told the outlet he was unsure what critics thought there was to be envious of. In October, he and Siddiq released a joint reviewer statement urging scholars to decline peer review of unvetted AI-generated manuscripts and to press journals to enforce their AI disclosure policies.
A Publishing System Already Buckling Under Submission Floods
Polson's case landed amid a broader crunch in academic publishing. Elsevier publications saw submissions increase by 1.5 million since 2022, and the company's journals together received over 4.2 million article submissions in 2025 — a 68 percent jump from 2021 — while accepting roughly 795,000 papers, according to SBS News. Elsevier runs SSRN alongside thousands of peer-reviewed journals, and in March it expanded an automated screening tool called Check Integrity across nearly 2,000 journals to flag ethical violations, unauthorized authorship changes, and submission irregularities before manuscripts reach peer review, per PR Newswire.
Claudine Gartenberg, a senior editor at Organization Science, said submissions to her journal have doubled since 2022 and that the publishing system is not equipped right now to handle the coming flood of poor-quality research, according to the Post. Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch and a New York University journalism professor, told The College Fix the real question is whether papers add value and should be relied on, and argued the underlying system is more worth examining than any one scholar's specific case. He tied the pressure directly to academia's publish-or-perish culture, which pushes scholars to produce a certain volume of research and journal articles regardless of AI's role.
Polson continues to teach two classes this fall at Chicago Booth — Bayes, AI and Deep Learning, and Business Statistics — and his university research page lists work on topics including the energy cost of using AI and the odds of cheating. He previously co-authored the 2018 book AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together with University of Texas at Austin statistician James Scott, a project that examined mathematical algorithms and the case for blending human and machine intellect years before this controversy. Both Polson and the University of Chicago media relations office did not respond to comment requests The College Fix sent twice by email.
