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AI in Research

This guide offers advice on AI-powered tools and functionality created for or used in academic research.

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Digital Scholarship Services

DSS fosters the use of digital content and transformative technology in scholarship and academic activities. We provide consultative and technical support for a wide range of tools and platforms. We work with the campus community to publish, promote, and preserve the digital products of research through consultation, teaching, and systems administration. Our areas of expertise include data curation, research data management, computational research, digital humanities, and scholarly communication.

Note

Use of AI is fraught with complications involving accuracy, bias, academic integrity, and intellectual property and may not be appropriate in all academic settings. This guide is meant more for academic researchers looking to utilize AI tools in their research.

Students are strongly advised to consult with their instructor before using AI-generated content in their research or coursework. For information on Generative AI take a look at the Generative AI and Information Literacy guide.

Assessing AI Research Tools

Here are suggested questions to ask when assessing the quality of AI tools for research:

Access Do you have access? Is there a cost to use this tool? Is the cost determined by size of collection/free vs. premium features?
Accuracy Are summaries, extracted information, and other outputs accurate? Do they provide enough detail?  
Relevancy Are the tool's results and recommendations relevant? Do the most relevant items sort to the top of the search results?
Sources Are its sources comprehensive for your discipline or topic? How much scholarly information does this tool access? Does it have access to actual data sources? How does it deal with retracted research?
Chatbot How well do the conversational features work? Do they show common pitfalls of generative AI chatbots (i.e. vagueness, hallucinations, reliance on biased or limited training data)? 
Data How will the chatbot conversations and personal data be used? Does the tool creator share my values on data security, ethics and privacy? 
Goals What do I hope to learn? Will using this tool help me achieve that goal, or will it undermine my learning? Does this tool introduce more work to double check AI outputs?