A Review of the TITAN Guideline: Advancing Transparency and Responsible Artificial Intelligence Use in Medical Research and Scholarly Publishing

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into medical research and scholarly publishing, supporting activities such as literature searching, data analysis, medical imaging, manuscript preparation, and peer review. Despite these opportunities, AI use introduces concerns related to hallucinations, bias, privacy, confidentiality, copyright, reproducibility, and scientific accountability. Existing guidance provides important principles for responsible AI use, but reporting practices remain variable. This article reviews the TITAN guidelines as a practical framework for improving transparency and responsible reporting of AI use in medical research and scholarly publishing. The TITAN guidelines provide a proportionate and technology neutral approach to AI reporting. It distinguishes minor uses, such as language assistance, from substantive applications involving research design, analysis, interpretation, or scientific content. The framework emphasizes that human researchers retain responsibility for evaluating AI outputs and the integrity of published work. It also provides a basis for authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers to incorporate standardized AI reporting into scholarly workflows. TITAN offers a practical framework for documenting meaningful AI involvement while supporting transparency, reproducibility, and human accountability. Its flexible structure can accommodate emerging AI technologies, including multimodal and agentic systems. Periodic revision and coordinated adoption by medical journals and research communities will be important to maintain its relevance as AI capabilities continue to evolve.