Using Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can summarize vast quantities of sources, help you brainstorm or refine your research question, outline topics, help with statistical analysis and more. Learn how to use AI to boost your research productivity ethically and responsibly.
Check the syllabus or confirm with your instructor that your intended use of AI is acceptable. Look to UNE’s academic integrity policy and the Guide for the Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Research and the AI-U Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence.
How AI can Support Research
- As a Starting Point
- Use AI as a starting point to brainstorm or clarify your research topic. It can also summarize or outline topics to identify what kind of evidence exists, or find gaps in the literature.
- Search Strategies
- AI can supply keywords, synonyms, or boolean search strings for searching databases.
- Discover Articles
- Specialized AI research tools like Consensus, Elicit, Semantic Scholar, and Research Rabbit are limited to genuine scholarly sources and provide links to the original research papers.
- Summarize Articles or Synthesize Evidence
- AI tools can summarize articles and break down complex concepts, but fact-check any AI-generated claims by tracing them back to the original sources. Never directly quote AI-generated summaries – always cite the original paper.
- Writing Assistance
- Use AI to help polish your writing and correct grammar, but be sure to review suggested corrections for accuracy and to retain your own voice. AI tools can automatically generate citations and format your reference list, but be sure to check them for accuracy.
- Data Analysis and Visualization
- AI can help analyze large datasets, code qualitative research, and with statistical analysis. AI can also generate images, charts, figures, infographics, and dashboards that you can use in your work with proper attribution.
- Personalized Learning Support
- Create a personalized chatbot tutor, create quizzes, flashcards, translate or convert text to speach, or even video.
Reponsible Use
Evaluate generated information before you use it for your research project, or share it with others, to determine if it is from reliable and credible sources. Be aware of:
- Hallucinations
- AI tools can produce hallucinations, or generate information that is false, fabricated, or not based on a real source. AI hallucinations are presented as confidently as if it were accurate and can include citing academic papers or books that do not exist, inventing quotes and attributing them to real people, and generating inaccurate facts, statistics, or historical dates.
- Bias
- Bias can occur when the data an AI was trained on reflects historical prejudices or doesn’t represent all groups equally. The way AI systems are designed, what features they prioritize, or how the ‘success’ of what they produce is measured can also contribute to bias.
Ethical Use
Using AI ethically means being honest about your use of it. Describe the tool’s use in a disclosure statement in your methodology or an acknowledgments section of your paper. Include the tool used, the version, as well as the prompts given. See our citation style guides for specific guidance on AI disclosure and citation.
Example:
AI Usage Disclosure: This document was created with the assistance of [AI tool and version]. The AI was used to [describe use, include a link if possible]. All AI-generated content was reviewed for accuracy and author assumes full responsibility for the final content.
Questions & Help
If you have questions on this, or another topic, contact a librarian for help!