Yeah that was my instinct too. What sort of career defining trends are visible with this much historical data? Feels like someone wrote clickbait research to get published.

The study looks at forms of AI that have existed for a long time, as well as newer LLMs. From the article: "Their dataset included 41.3 million English-language papers published between 1980 and 2025 in ..."

Earlier studies looked at the effect of web search on research. This is all covered near the beginning of the article.