Academic Writing Assisted by Artificial Intelligence and Ethical Use in Higher Education: A Review (2020–2026)
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This systematic literature review analyzes academic writing assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) and its ethical use among higher education students during the 2020–2026 period. The study followed a qualitative, documentary approach and was guided by three questions: how AI is used in higher education, whether students make ethical use of AI in academic writing, and how such use relates to ethics in academic writing. Following the PRISMA 2020 protocol, a search was conducted in the Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and Latindex databases, complemented by highly cited journals, which resulted in the identification of 332 initial records and the selection of a final corpus of 28 primary studies, most of them published between 2023 and 2025. The findings show that tools such as ChatGPT have become a relevant form of support for the organization, drafting, feedback, and linguistic improvement of academic texts, and that they promote idea generation and critical thinking when their use serves a formative purpose. However, their integration poses significant ethical challenges related to academic integrity, authorship, plagiarism, and technological dependence, compounded by the difficulty teachers and students face in distinguishing AI-generated texts from those written by humans. The evidence indicates that the ethical use of these tools remains partial and heterogeneous, and that clear institutional policies reduce students’ perceived ethical ambiguity. It is concluded that the responsible implementation of generative AI in higher education requires clear institutional policies, critical AI literacy training, and pedagogical strategies focused on transparency and accountability, rather than merely on punitive detection, and that future research should include longitudinal and comparative designs.
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