AI Chatgpt

  Chatgpt has got so many people in academics addicted to the platform but, one thing to note is that these some of these citations are fake and it's not very reliable to be used in academic research.

 However if you're someone who is a little bit too addicted and can't leave the platform there are actually some ways that you  can use chatgpt in an ethical way but also in a reliable way that doesn't compromise your research or your results.

 In today's post I have 10 different reasons why and how you can use chatgpt to help you with your research processes and to help you with writing and understanding your research  better. 

So if you'd like to see more of this kind of stuff in this blog, then don't forget to express your thoughts in comment section, and also let me know whether you use chatgpt that much in your research and are you allowed to? And also is it something that you find helpful and how?

 So let us now delve into the the business of the day, how can we use chatgpt in our academic research:

1. Brainstorming

The first way is for brainstorming, I like to use chatgpt to brainstorm when I'm just thinking about ideas and then I'll use these initial ideas to take them off chatgpt and take them to other AI platforms that are more research based or even to PubMed. So let's say I were to ask a question and use a prompt something like "find a research topic for a PhD in the area of _____" and that is my prompt and then chatgpt will now respond with full of rich topics for me, and I'm able to take those topics and take them to a platform where I can  think about it in a more critical and analytical way to find actual research papers to back up my understanding and then continue from there. You might find that it might not be very helpful and may not give you very accurate information, but it does give you a starting point, and it can be very useful  for brainstorming for topics that maybe are not very available.


2. Refining titles

The next way is to refine my titles and my subheadings I really like to use this. I really love to use chatgpt actually for this reason. You have a title you've put this title together but you don't quite love it you don't think it's that great and you want to just kinda refine it to make it sound a lot more appealing or to make it shorter or longer. The you can stick it into chatgpt and ask chatgpt to refine this title to make it more appealing or to aim it to a scientific audience or for a journal or for a conference. So just be really specific with the prompts that you give chatgpt and then you'll find that that gives you a couple of options. 

If you don't like those options, you can say give me five more, give me ten more, make them longer, make them shorter and keep on inputting. 

So it honestly really helps and I find that it just gives me a nice  kind of a range of options I can choose from.

3. Pulling out keywords 

The next thing is to provide me with some keywords so let's say you have a massive paragraph and you just want to pull out five keywords from that paragraph, maybe for your abstract. For example you want to pull out five keywords from the paragraph to include at the bottom of your abstract. You can just use chatgpt for that, and just prompt "pull out what are the five keywords for this particular abstract" and it will give you those five keywords and that is most likely what you will go with. This is great because, its not including any information here it's just putting out some keywords for you that can be used to help you with your writing.

4. Outline an essay 

The next thing I like to use it is to outline an essay. Well I haven't used it like this myself but I have suggested it quite a few times to use it in putting out an essay outline. 

So when you have an essay title and you don't even know where to begin, you've got done all this reading and you have an idea of sort of what you want to include but you just need an outline, you can use chatgpt to give you an essay outline. 

From there you can begin the actual process of writing, a lot of us really struggle when we have complete blank slate, when I have a blank piece of paper in front of me I struggle for kind of how to begin it even if I know the information. It's sometimes so hard to just get something down on paper to begin with. 

So this is really nice  it just gives you a nice outline for how to begin and it just breaks it down for you into all the different sections you might want to speak about. You'll keep some of them you might amend but it's good way to begin. 

5. Referencing 

The next way I like to use chatgpt is for referencing. Now I mentioned to you  in the beginning the references they provide are obviously incorrect and they are fake. 

So don't use the references that they provide to you but let's say you have a reference and you want to change it and rewrite it in a specific format I would definitely use chatgpt for that. 

Let's say you have a reference and it's in Harvard you want to change it to APA you can say change this or write this reference in APA format, or let's say you have a website link and you want to write it as in Harvard, because I found that students really struggle with writing websites as in actual references, and then you can do that as well. So it's just a nice way of converting references and rewriting it in the correct format.

That's how I use it but give it your references, don't ask it for new references, it's likely to give you fake one.

6. Method 

The next thing I like to use it, is for my methods. Now you're probably wondering methods? Yes, i used it to understand my methods more. 

So if you use a particular technique and you don't really understand it and you want to justify why you'd use that technique, you can just ask chatgpt "can you give me a reason why I'd use western blotting to discover a protein knockdown" and it'll give you a good reason. So you can use it to help you understand why you're using a specific approach and then you can use that to help you write that section of your methods. 

You can even say something like "chatgpt analyze the strengths or weaknesses of a specific method" that you are thinking of using. 

Again, you're not writing that text in your actual thesis but you're using it to help you understand it and then you can use parts of that for when you're justifying why you've used your particular method. 

Another way that I like to use it for methods is, for example, if I'm using quantitative or qualitative analysis and I'm not quite sure which one falls into which or if it's a mixed method, you can just ask chatgpt, I'm planning on doing X analysis, is it quantitative, is it qualitative, give other alternative methods or approaches and it can do that for you. 

7. Writing results 

The next way I like to use it is for writing some results, so in your results you might want to use third person for your thesis and you can ask it to convert what you've written into third person or make it sound passive and again you're not writing anything original, you're just converting it, it's just rewriting it in another way for you but do make sure you go back and check and read it to ensure that it actually makes sense, always do that of course. So this is a nice way of converting what you already have and transforming it into a slightly different format. 

8. Improving language 

The next way is to improve language, again I really like this, I think it works well if you're someone that hasn't got English as a first language or if you're someone who isn't used to academic writing because academic writing is quite concerned with the way you arranges information, so you could take a bit of text, not all of it, but like a paragraph or a few sentences and say write this in a more academically appropriate format or write this in a passive voice or improve or cut down the number of words in this paragraph. 

So you are the one who has written it, you are the author of this work, it has just been edited by chat GPT and funnily enough there's actually a journal, that said that they are going to accept papers that were written or have used chat GPT or AI to help enhance the academic writing but you cannot list the AI platform as an author but you can use it to help you enhance and make small edits and changes to the work, so that's just by the way, to show that I think it's becoming more pertinent that AI is not going anywhere and it's definitely here to stay, so it's important for us to learn how to use it ethically and to use it for best practices.

9. Writing summary 

The next way I like to use it is to give me quick summaries, if you're writing an abstract you need to understand what you've done and what your research is in a quick way that summarizes everything, so again if you have a paragraph of text and you don't quite understand it or you're copying and pasting it from a different book or another research paper, you can just put it into chat GPT and say can you summarize this for me? You're not copying and pasting that summarized text, you're just using it to understand and to get a like a simpler version of what's in front of you and I think that's completely okay. 

10. Time scheduling 

And last but definitely not least the least, if you are a follow of mine and you've been here for a little while, you know how much I absolutely love productivity and time management. 

So chat GPT can really help you with forming a schedule for your time, so you can say something like I'm writing a 10,000 word thesis, I need to complete it in three months, give me a table or create a table of how much I have to write every single day between now and March the 14th in order to complete my thesis and it will tabulate it for you and it will give you a full schedule.

So that's really helpful if you're someone who wants to just quickly break down and get a clear idea of schedule and a timeline. 

Yeah! I hope this is helpful, I mean I hope I introduce you to new ways of using chat GPT that go beyond write this essay for me, you know that's obviously not ethical, it's obviously not something I'd recommend but there are ways that you can use it, it's not going anywhere, it's here to stay so it's important we learn how to use it.


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