Research Guides: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in Higher Education: AI in Scholarly Research & Writing

Do's and Don'ts of ChatGPT for Research

First of all, differentiate between GenAI chatbots, such as ChatGPT or Claude, and other kinds of AI-powered research tools which may be trained to identify or connect scholarly research, such as Elicit or Research Rabbit. If you want to experiment with using AI in your research activities, ensure you choose a tool appropriate for each given purpose.

With regards to chatbots like ChatGPT, Litmap's Project Lead, Digl, suggests:

DO use ChatGPT to:

Summarize existing papers. Use handy tricks like “Give me 5 bullet points with a 300 word maximum” to get swift responses.
Create a paper outline
Rephrase and fix grammar. Plus, you can ask for explanations.
Write code

DON'T use ChatGPT to:

To find references or papers. ChatGPT is notorious for making up references, including author names, titles, and years of publication. You can even accuse it of doing so, and it happily fesses up.
Learn new information. Use summaries as guidelines or pointers to prioritize. Not checking ChatGPT’s responses means potentially trusting its hallucinations.
Write your finished text for you.
Math, maybe. This was a more serious issue at the launch of ChatGPT, but has potentially since been resolved with recent updates.

Source:

ChatGPT for Research: The Do's and Don'ts

Resources on GenAI in Scholarly Research

GenAI has has pros and cons for conducting research and writing papers.

Researchers embracing ChatGPT are like turkeys voting for Christmas
Textpocalypse: A Literary Scholar Eyes the “Grey Goo” of AI "At some level, it’s not going to be meaningful to make the distinction between a 'human-authored' or 'machine-authored' document. The vast majority of what we write is going to be kind of hybrid"
Using AI to write scholarly publications "Artificial intelligence (AI) natural language processing (NLP) systems, ...may soon be widely used in many forms of writing, including scientific and scholarly publications. While computer programs (such as Microsoft WORD and Grammarly) have incorporated automated text-editing features (such as checking for spelling and grammar) for many years, these programs are not designed to create content. However, new and emerging NLP systems are, which raises important issues for research ethics and research integrity."
AI and Scholarly Publishing: A View from Three Experts
Academic Publishers Are Missing the Point on ChatGPT
Understanding AI research ethics as a collective problem

Finding the Balance

"The issues with generative AI chatbots are known: accountability, potential to propagate bias, and not-always-reliable accuracy. But they can also help us humans to think in different and creative ways, and to streamline tedious tasks, which may ultimately be a boon for burdened researchers.

“'Think of GPTs not as a database but as a large collection of extremely smart economists, historians, scientists, and many others whom you can ask questions,' says..." "Tyler Cowan, economist and author of “How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, including GPT,” a paper with relevance far beyond economics."

Source:

Hanging in the Balance: Generative AI Versus Scholarly Publishing
By Gwen Weerts, The Scholarly Kitchen, 8 Jan 2024

AI Authorship: Publication Policies

COPE (Committee on Publishing Ethics) Position Statement on A.I. and Authorship
APA Journals AI Authorship Policy
Elsevier Publication Ethics
Science AI Authorship Policy
Springer Nature AI Authorship Policy
For Nature and all Springer Nature journals
An Initial Scholarly AI Taxonomy
A proposed taxonomy for describing the types of contributions that AI might make to a scholarly work (so that its role can be properly credited in a paper as some journals are beginning to require).

A.I. and the Researcher: ChatGPT & DALL-E in Scholarly Writing & Publishing (Feb 2023)

NOTE: This workshop was presented/recorded in Feb 2023, and thus some details may be outdated.

Download slides: AI and the Researcher (PDF)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License -- meaning you are free to share and adapt this work for non-commercial purposes as long as you give credit to the original creator and share your adapted work under this same license (without greater copyright restrictions).