Benefits of GenAI for researchers

Question prompts  

As a researcher, you are generating new ideas and new knowledge. The production of those ideas and that knowledge is your responsibility, but no one works in a vacuum. Discussing your ideas with others helps spark new ideas and make connections you might not have made on your own. 

These discussions will often be with your supervisors, with your progression panel members, with other doctoral students and with colleagues at conferences, etc. 

GenAI can also be useful as a tool to help prompt your thinking. Using GenAI to create question prompts can help you think more deeply about your topic or consider your topic from alternate angles. You can also use it as a sounding board for your ideas, and it can provide avenues to explore that you might not have considered otherwise. 

The key here is to retain control of your project and of your thought processes. GenAI is the tool; you are the researcher. You should treat any relevant prompts or ideas it generates as starting points for you to explore through your research. 

Sense checking 

From an equality, diversity and inclusionperspective, GenAI has the capacity to help mitigate systemic disadvantages individual researchers may face in the mechanical aspects of writing. GenAI is particularly useful for identifying spelling, grammar and syntax errors, and this can support those who are working in another language and/or those with specific learning difficulties. GenAIs trained on English datasets can help you refine the more mechanical components of your writing. 

Be careful in overly relying on GenAI programmes to spot your errors. Their training datasets may contain errors themselves, and you want to ensure your individual voice still comes through in your writing. 

Part of developing as a writer is understanding where your areas of improvement are and how to strengthen those. Using GenAI to identify those errors is a great start – you also want to understand how to correct those errors and work to spot them yourself. This will help you improve both your writing confidence and your writing ability. 

References and citations 

There are many tools that can help you manage your references and reference lists, including RefWorks, Mendeley, EndNote, and Zotero. Most of these let you write-and-cite, so you can generate and format a reference list from the citations in your text. GenAI can also generate and format reference lists for you based on your specified referencing style. 

Regardless of what referencing software you’re using, you will always need to make sure it matches the required style in all details. Most referencing software will make minor mistakes. Being aware of those details will help you spot any inconsistencies before you submit. 

Administrative tasks 

There are a host of administrative tasks with which AI can help you. You’re less likely to use GenAI for these than you are the AI programmes built into specific apps. However, you may find that GenAI can help you with some of your administrative work as well, depending on how you work and what you want.