Can we identify prominent scholars using ChatGPT?

Abstract

It may be tempting to learn about scholars using ChatGPT. To validate ChatGPT for this task a small experiment was conducted based on the 50 most cited researchers at the author’s university. The results show that ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) only recognized an ad-hoc subset of the scholars with no obvious connection to the respective authors’ citation attributes or internet footprint. Moreover, details about the recognized scholars were often erroneous.