What are appropriate ways to use GenAI in my research?
Answer
If you use GenAI for research, use it critically and with caution. Here are some tips for using GenAI for background research and summarizing of sources.
1. Background Research
Similar to Wikipedia, GenAI can be a starting place for background research or understanding a concept. However, you must fact-check what you learn from it because it is not a scholarly or reliable resource. The information it provides may be biased, inaccurate, vague, or outdated. Find a reliable source to verify the information’s validity.
- Learn about evaluating web sources for reliability to ensure the information is accurate.
- Contact the library for additional support with research.
2. Summarizing Articles
Some people like to use GenAI to summarize long texts such as scholarly articles, and there are several apps that support this. However, be aware that:
- By inputting a text into GenAI, you may be violating copyright laws. If you would like to use GenAI for this purpose, ensure that the LLM is not trained on your prompts. For example, you can turn off chat history and model training on ChatGPT. However, we recommend that you keep your own record of your chat history in case you need to review it, as this is the only copy of the source that exists.
- The summary could be an oversimplification of the article, or it could be inaccurate. Use the summary as a starting place to understand the main idea, then read the article yourself. A tip for reading is to focus on the abstract, introduction, and conclusion/discussion to understand the main idea and main points.
- Do not use GenAI to summarize a source if you need to summarize it yourself for your assignment. Instead, if you’re stuck, you can book an appointment with a writing specialist to learn summarizing strategies.