arxivcs.DLcs.AIcs.CL2026-06-28
Em-ergence of the em-dash: a population-level rise in em-dash frequency in medRxiv preprints at the dawn of the large-language-model era
Large language models (LLMs) can leave subtle stylistic traces in assisted text; one of the most cited is the em-dash (Unicode U+2014). Yet no one has measured whether em-dash use has changed in the scientific literature. This study, pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (…