---
title: "Who writes the annual report now? (research idea)"
description: "Annual reports, 10-K filings, narrative disclosure and readability appear on 99 recent papers in the finance and accounting journals, but only 9 of them carry a generative-AI, language-model or AI-generated keyword. If language models now draft the management discussion, do the text measures researchers rely on still mean anything?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/who-writes-the-annual-report-now
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/who-writes-the-annual-report-now.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Annual reports, 10-K filings, narrative disclosure and readability appear on 99 recent papers in the finance and accounting journals, but only 9 of them carry a generative-AI, language-model or AI-generated keyword."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["accounting", "finance", "ai"]
keywords: ["narrative disclosure", "readability", "10-K filings"]
---

# Who writes the annual report now?

Annual reports, 10-K filings, narrative disclosure and readability appear on 99 recent papers in the finance and accounting journals, but only 9 of them carry a generative-AI, language-model or AI-generated keyword. If language models now draft the management discussion, do the text measures researchers rely on still mean anything?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 99 papers carry an annual-report, 10-K, MD&A, narrative-disclosure, readability or textual-analysis keyword (60 in finance journals, 19 in accounting): "10-K filings" on 27, "narrative disclosure" on 13, "readability" on 10. Only 9 of the 99 also carry a generative-AI, ChatGPT, language-model or AI-generated keyword.

## Questions

- Can AI-written passages in filings be detected, and what share of recent filings contains them?
- Did readability, tone and boilerplate measures shift after 2023 in a way that reflects the drafting tool rather than the firm?
- Do investors react differently to AI-drafted and human-drafted disclosures, once they can tell them apart?

## Data that could help

The text of 10-K filings from SEC EDGAR for 2018–2025, AI-text detectors, and market reactions to filings.

## Next step

Run an AI-text detector on the MD&A sections of all 10-K filings for 2021–2025 and track the share flagged by year and by firm size.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| narrative disclosure | 2 | #1303 | 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2 | 21 |
| readability | 1 | #2881 | 2, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 1, 0, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 5, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 0, 1, 0 | 45 |
| 10-K filings | 0 | – | 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 3, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 1, 1, 3, 0, 3, 0, 3, 2, 1, 1, 0, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 2, 0, 0 | 53 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Who writes the annual report now?. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/who-writes-the-annual-report-now

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-who-writes-the-annual-report-now,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Who writes the annual report now?},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/who-writes-the-annual-report-now}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).