Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI and Academic Research

AI can support research in several ways, helping students and faculty streamline their work, analyze data, and improve the quality of their findings. Here are some key ways AI can be used in research:

1. Generating Research Ideas

• AI can suggest research questions based on a given topic or dataset, helping students develop hypotheses and refine their focus.

2. Literature Review

• AI-powered tools can quickly scan, summarize, and analyze academic papers, identifying key themes, trends, and gaps in existing research.

3. Data Analysis

• AI can process large datasets, recognizing patterns, trends, and correlations that may not be immediately obvious.
• It can help with statistical analysis, making complex data easier to interpret.

4. Experiment Design

• AI can suggest variables, methodologies, and experimental conditions based on existing research, improving the design and efficiency of experiments.

5. Writing and Editing

• AI tools can assist with drafting, proofreading, and editing research papers, helping with grammar, clarity, and structure.

Important Considerations

While AI can be a helpful research tool, it has limitations, including accuracy, bias, and potential issues with academic integrity. Students should always check with their instructor before using AI in their research and ensure they cite any AI-generated content properly.

Always Verify Information

Generative AI can create incorrect or made-up information (a phenomenon known as "hallucination"). Always fact-check responses before relying on them.

What Generative AI is Good For:

• Brainstorming Ideas – Helps generate and refine research topics.

• Narrowing Research Topics & Keywords – Assists in identifying key search terms for library databases. 

• Explaining Complex Topics – Breaks down information in a simple, easy-to-understand way.

• Summarizing & Outlining – Condenses information and helps create structured outlines.

• Asking Questions – Provides quick responses to unlimited questions, but always fact-check.

• Translating Text – It can translate into different languages, though it may not be fluent.

• Writing & Debugging Code – Assists with programming by suggesting or fixing code.

• Humor & Creativity – Useful for generating jokes, storytelling, and improvisation.

What Generative AI is Not Good For:

• Completing Assignments for You – AI-generated content does not meet academic integrity standards; your work must be your own.

• Library Research – AI cannot access library databases or scholarly articles directly. Use MVC Library A-Z Databases or contact an MVC Librarian for reliable sources. 

• High-Stakes Information – Avoid using Generative AI for critical topics like medical, financial, or legal advice, as it may provide incorrect but confident-sounding answers.

• ChatPDF
  ChatPDF is an AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI that can understand and generate human-like text based on the input it receives. It uses a large language model trained on a vast amount of text data to answer questions, provide explanations, generate text, and more.

• Consensus
  A search engine that uses AI to search over 200 million scientific papers from Semantic Scholar and deliver reliable, evidence-based answers tied to actual studies. It also provides summaries of the top articles it analyzes, making it easier to understand complex research.

• Elicit
  AI search assistant for researchers and academics helps conduct literature reviews by identifying relevant research papers on a topic and summarizing key points.

• Paper Digest
  AI-based article summarization service that aims to help researchers quickly grasp the core ideas of a paper and help them decide whether it is worth reading.

• Perplexity
  AI-powered search engine that responds to questions by summarizing relevant sources from the internet with inline citations. Perplexity's paid Pro Search includes additional features, such as an interactive search mode that asks clarifying questions to guide the AI search process and find the best answer.

• Research Rabbit
  Described as the “Spotify of research,” users can create collections of academic papers from which the software can learn to give them relevant recommendations. It also visualizes scholarly networks in graphs, so it’s possible to follow the work of specific authors or topics.

• Scholarcy
  AI summarization tool that reads your research articles, reports, and book chapters and extracts key information to create a summary flashcard identifying study participants, data analyses, main findings, and limitations.

• Scite
  AI platform that helps researchers find and understand research articles through Smart Citations. Scite uses access to full-text articles and its deep learning model to tell you how many times an article was cited and the context of the citation (i.e., whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence).

• Semantic Scholar
  Free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature. Semantic Scholar helps researchers understand a paper at a glance by extracting meaning and identifying connections from within papers. Indexes over 200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls.

Want to see a more comprehensive list of AI-powered research tools? Check out Ithaka S+R's Generative AI Product Tracker.