JFLM Editor in Chief’s Update

September 2026

servlet Fall/spring greetings to FFLM members (depending on your hemisphere).

The official periodical of the Faculty, the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, continues to thrive. We are on pace to set a record for submissions this year, having already exceeded last year’s total of 697 as of September 1. Part, if not the majority, of the explanation for the increased rate of submissions is the freight train of AI technologies barreling down the track of biomedical publishing, including in the forensic medical and scientific literature. A report published in Nature last month noted that 90% of the literature published in December of 2025 in PubMed showed signs of AI assistance (see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02551-z). While the number of papers has dramatically increased, the quality and validity of the publications have not, and AI hallucinations are as prevalent in a list of carelessly compiled citations as they are in a high schooler’s essay on post-modern symbolism in a James Joyce novel.

There are, of course, submissions that are entirely AI-generated, but these are fairly easy to spot, thankfully. They typically come from an author who has little to no history of publishing in the forensic literature and/or does not have any background in forensic medicine or science. Some submissions are modestly entertaining; for example, in the past month, we received a submission from a (supposed) faculty member in an engineering department at an obscure university, who wrote about Michael Jackson’s death and “Peter Pan Syndrome.” There was no point to the paper, and it consisted of obviously AI-synthesized news accounts of the death. Perhaps the biggest clue that the manuscript contained AI-generated defects was that the only illustration for the paper was a copy of a poster of Michael Jackson moonwalking. I should also mention that this was only one of five papers the same author submitted at the same time (all five received the same editorial fate).

While there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical of the use of AI in scientific publishing, at the JFLM we have also seen some benefits. In past years, one of the more common reasons to reject a paper prior to or after peer review is poor English usage, grammar, syntax, or spelling. Because the JFLM attracts submissions from authors in many countries where English is not a first language, this has in the past been a common reason for rejection, even when the author’s work showed good promise and would have been a valuable addition to the literature. This issue has been all but eradicated by AI grammar-review programs such as Grammarly (which requires a subscription for advanced features) and free programs like QuillBot and Scribbr. Rejection of a manuscript for poor English language usage has been relatively rare over the past year.

Regardless of the balance between the positives and negatives of AI, the technology is here to stay in biomedical publishing, and we need to continue to navigate it as best we can. That is, as soon as I revisit my 50-year-old essay on Ulysses with a little help from my friends at ChatGPT.

Best wishes to everyone

Michael Freeman

Editor-in-Chief, JFLM

Past JFLM Editor in Chief’s Updates

Greetings, fellow Faculty aficionados!

I had the honor of taking on the Editor-in-Chief position at the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine in January of 2025, and it has been a true pleasure.

I had several short-term and long-term goals for the Journal when I started, including making the experience better for submitting authors by improving turnaround time for manuscript review and, in furtherance of this goal, bringing on more associate editors. At the beginning of 2025, we had 3 associate editors, and by the end of next month, I anticipate we will have doubled that number. This is good news all round and should significantly cut down on review time.

My second goal was to improve the JFLM’s statistics relative to other forensic medicine/science journals. The metric most people think of for academic journals is the Impact Factor (IF), an index related to how often articles published in the journal are cited in other publications. A journal’s IF is rather like the year and brand of the car that sits in your driveway versus your neighbor’s cars. You tell everyone that it’s not important that your car is the newest one on the street, but, when no one’s looking, you can’t help but feel a wee bit superior nonetheless. The JFLM’s IF had dropped to 1.2 in prior years, which placed it in the lower half of forensic journals (specialty journals generally have far lower IFs than general medicine or science journals). I’m quite happy to share the fact that, for 2025, the JFLM IF increased 42% in comparison with 2024, and is now at 1.7. We still have a ways to go, but this is encouraging news. Just don’t say anything to the neighbors.

I will continue to report on other JFLM developments and highlight papers of note in our Faculty newsletter, so stay tuned.

Best wishes to everyone

Michael Freeman

Editor-in-Chief, JFLM