AI Tools for Assignments and Research

• Cochrane Collaboration’s current stance on AI Tools can be found here: https://futurecochrane.org/newnews/cochrane-announces-new-policy-on-ai-generated-content  
• Currently JBI’s response to the use of AI Tools is, “At this time, we do not have specific guidelines either recommending or advising against the use of AI tools. However, we strongly encourage transparent reporting of any AI tools utilized in the process.” 
• The PRISMA Group’s response is that “The Prisma Group has not formed an official position on the use of AI in systematic reviews. As indicated throughout the PRISMA 2020 explanation and elaboration paper, we recognise some systematic review teams will use AI tools to assist them with searching, screening, data collection and quality assessment. In such cases, PRISMA recommends authors declare the use of such tools and provide some information about them. In future updates to PRISMA 2020, I anticipate we will include guidance on the use of generative AI tools to assist in the writing of the systematic review report.” 

 The Southern Cross University Library has a table outlining some of the AI tools, their use and their limitations in systematic review creation.  

• AI tools sometimes hallucinate and, if an AI tool doesn't know the answer to a question, it often presents a plausible fabrication alongside a convincing set of invented references that do not refer to any actual source. 
• AI is good for identifying ideas about well cited concepts but is not as able to handle rarely cited concepts and ideas. This is a particular problem for Systematic/Scoping reviews which often discover or report on gaps in the literature. 
• Part of the rigor of a Systematic/Scoping review is the transparency and reproducibility of the research discovered and analysed. The statistical nature of AI tools make reproducibility difficult, and AI tools can struggle to identify how or what it searched to give you its resources or conclusions. 
• Search strategies – AI Tools can create compelling search strategies but some of them hallucinate subject headings that do not exist. Currently, many AI tools do not seem to fully understand how to use wildcard characters, truncation or proximity searches.  
• An AI Tool reflects the human and cultural bias (including language) contained in its corpus of training data. If its corpus is farmed from Anglophone sources, for instance, it will not necessarily have the capacity to generate outputs for a variety of cultural contexts. Societal and cultural impacts must be considered when thinking of using AI tools. 
• AI Tools sustainability – the ability to keep up with the continual rapid changes in AI is not sustainable for systematic and scoping reviews.  Reviews created now with the aid of AI could be substantially different to those create in 2 years’ time due to these continuous changes.  The whole point of these reviews are that they are transparent and reproducible by all. 

Potential Benefits of Using AI Tools 

• Efficiency, Productivity, and Innovation.  AI tools can efficiently complete some process of a review that might take days or weeks by a human. They can also generate ideas, providing different ways of looking at, presenting and identifying ideas you may not have considered on your own.  
• You can use AI tools to assist in the parts of a review that does not require rigor, transparency or reproducibility (but you will need to undertake manual checks on all outputs produced by AI tools). Good uses of AI tools can include: 
  • Brainstorming ideas 
  • Writing introductions and conclusions 
  • Summarising and analysing large amounts of text  
  • Identifying research gaps  
  • Highlighting key findings from existing research  
  • Establishing Inclusion criteria 
  • Searching for relevant research data  
  • Developing relevant research methods 
• AI Tools can be used to help find research and generate ideas, rather than producing the finished body of work. 

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