Writing Style Similarity Reflects Academic Genealogy

[2608.14843] Writing Style Similarity Reflects Academic Genealogy Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Search arXiv Press Enter to search · Advanced search Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2608.14843 (cs) [Submitted on 14 Aug 2026 ( v1 ), last revised 29 Aug 2026 (this version, v2)] Title: Writing Style Similarity Reflects Academic Genealogy Authors: Cameron Manzo View a PDF of the paper titled Writing Style Similarity Reflects Academic Genealogy, by Cameron Manzo View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: As authorship attribution systems are increasingly deployed to detect ghostwritten and AI-generated papers, their errors can support accusations against legitimate authors. These systems conflate stylistic similarity with individual identity. Researchers, however, study under advisors, and inherit their stylistic quirks. We build a corpus of arXiv authors with $\geq 2$ solo papers from the Mathematics Genealogy Project graph, giving $5{,}803$ total authors and $2{,}501$ ground-truth advisor-student pairings. Using embeddings from a fine-tuned model, advisors sit $39.9\%$ closer in cosine distance to their students than a random same-field author does. Using two open models, we reproduce the effect at $12.6\%$ and $14.5\%$. Academic siblings, two students of one advisor who may never have met, sit $30.4\%$ closer across $8{,}360$ pairs, even when they studied at different institutions. Pairs who share only institution and field show negligible similarity. Given a closed-set attribution task over the same corpus, the system's errors occur on the true author's advisor, student, academic sibling, or lab mate $11$ times more often than chance. Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL) ; Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2608.14843 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:2608.14843v2 [cs.CL] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14843 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Cameron Manzo [ view email ] [v1] Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:35:39 UTC (11 KB) [v2] Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:54:32 UTC (12 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Writing Style Similarity Reflects Academic Genealogy, by Cameron Manzo View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CL < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? ) We gratefully acknowledge support from our major funders , member institutions , , and all contributors. About · Help · Contact · Subscribe · Copyright · Privacy · Accessibility · Operational Status (opens in new tab) Major funding support from

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