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Scholarly Communication Support: Planning, Conducting, Sharing, Promoting, & Assessing Research

This guide will acquaint researchers with knowledge and tools to assist in planning, conducting, disseminating, promoting, and assessing research.

Considerations and Guidance for GenAI Use in Research

Click on image to see it full-size

flowchart to help determine if it's safe to use generative AI depending on whether it matters if the output is true, whether you have the expertise to verify the accuracy of the output, and whether you are willing to take full responsibility for any inaccuracies

Adapted from Erin Owens with permission from "Safe to Use Generative AI" figure by University of South Florida Libraries. CC-BY.

Text version of flowchart above:

  • Does it matter if the output is true?
    • No -> Safe to use Generative AI
    • Yes -> Do you have the expertise to verify that the output is accurate?
      • No -> Unsafe to use Generative AI
      • Yes -> Are you willing to take full responsibility for inaccuracies?
        • No -> Unsafe to use Generative AI
        • Yes -> Possible to use Generative AI

Differentiate between general GenAI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, and AI-powered research tools trained to identify or connect scholarly research, such as Elicit. If you want to experiment with AI in research, choose tools appropriate for each purpose.

MAYBE consider using ChatGPT to:

  1. Summarize existing papers. Try, “Give me 5 bullet points with a 300 word maximum." But be aware, AI-generated summaries often ignore nuance and over-simplify results; be sure to eventually read relevant papers yourself.

  2. Create a paper outline

  3. Rephrase and  fix grammar. Plus, you can ask for explanations.

DON'T use ChatGPT to:

  1. 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.

  2. Learn new information. Use summaries only as guidelines or pointers to prioritize further research. Not checking ChatGPT’s responses means potentially trusting its hallucinations.

  3. Write your finished text for you.

Ultimately, any uses of AI in scholarly research and writing should at a minimum reflect these core principles:

  • Substantial human contribution;
  • Human vetting and guaranteeing, human accountability for accuracy;
  • Acknowledgement and transparency regarding AI use.

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Sources:

 

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.
Gwen Weerts, The Scholarly Kitchen, 8 Jan 2024

Specific Publishers' Policies

IRB Applications

If you plan to use generative AI tools to analyze data from human subjects, you are encouraged to be transparent and specific about this in your IRB application. (Please note, this is general advice, not specifically issued by SHSU's IRB.)

  • Name the tools you intend to use and how you intend to use it.
  • Provide links to the vendor's data security and privacy policies.
  • As part of the informed consent process, include an opt-out option for participants who may not want an LLM to process their personal data.

Generative AI dislosure statements should indicate, first, What tool did you use? Specify what AI or AI-enabled tools were ued. Second, Why did you use it? Identify the reason you used an AI or AI-enabled tools. Third, How did you use it? Provide some info about how you used the tool.

(click on the image to see a larger version in its source context)

Classification Systems to Help Describe Types of AI Use in Research

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

 

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