AI Tools for Assignments and Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a useful tool to help your research. AI can help generate ideas or suggest different ways of looking at, presenting or identifying concepts you may not have considered on your own. AI tools should, however, be used to assist your research and not as a replacement for your own expert knowledge or ability to critically analyse data. 

AI outputs need to be checked and verified to ensure they are accurate, written in an appropriate tone and level for your discipline, and are relevant to your research. Large Language Models (LLMs), commonly referred to as AI, are simply complex statistical models, and they do not think in the way human beings do. 

If using AI to support your research practice, you must ensure that the privacy and data of participants, researchers and institutions are protected. AI programs present potential risks to copyright, intellectual property, confidentiality and ethics. Do not put any sensitive material into an AI tool, as you will lose control of, and the rights over, that data. In other words, do not put any information into an AI tool that you would not normally make publicly available. 

With most AI tools it is not immediately clear what literature the tool has had access to, what data it was trained on, or how often that body of literature has been updated. AI Tools are unlikely to include resources that are behind a paywall, and where they do there may be issues around copyright. Limited access to training data limits the responses AI tools can give and may mean they exclude the most authoritative authors and resources. 

As publishing is part of the research lifecycle, it is important to develop an aspirational list of quality journals you would like to publish in. It is also important to check if the journals you aspire to be published in accept the use of AI tools in the creation of research outputs. At present, some journals permit the use of AI tools, some do not, and some are silent on whether AI tools can be used in the production of research outputs. If a particular journal does not seem to have a policy on the use of AI tools, you can check if the journal publisher has an AI tools policy for their suite of journals. You can also contact the Journal’s editors to ask about their stance on the use of AI tools. Regardless, whenever AI Tools are used in your research, their use must be acknowledged in your published papers.   

The University of Adelaide has an informative table that outlines major publishers policies on AI use. 

The Texas A&M Libraries has a useful list of Selected AI-Based Literature Review Tools detailing what they are and how to use them. 

The Southern Cross University Library has a list of GenAI tools for research which help support different stages of research such as Planning Research, Conducting Research and Publishing research. 

GRS GenAI Guidelines by the James Cook University Graduate School of Research  

Artificial Intelligence by the University of Adelaide  

GenAI tools for research by the Southern Cross University Library 

Systematic and Systematic-Style Reviews by the Southern Cross University Library 

Using AI’s in reviews by the Health Sciences Library at the Royal Melbourne Hospital 

AI-Based Literature Review Tools by Texas A&M University