Can AI Alleviate Faculty Burnout? AI Tools for University Faculty, Part 3: AI for faculty research-

Research is the second main role requiring much of my time and energy as a faculty member.

As someone who is curious about many areas, I tend to have several research projects going on at the same time. I would love to be able to speed up the completion of my work so it can be submitted for journal review quicker.

Can I leverage AI in this pursuit?

The use of AI in academic research remains controversial. As widespread access to AI has been with us less than a year, it’s understandable that confusion around the appropriate, or even allowable, use of these powerful programs persists.

The potential for the automation of time-consuming, repetitive tasks, such as gathering previous literature for discussion in order to position the work you have done, is striking.

Because of the power of some of these tools, conducting a meta analysis seems less intimidating to me now! However, copyright concerns over content generated from third party software and potential bias within the programs deriving from the inputs they were “trained” with are prominent ethical issues for the use of such tools in academic writing.

Personally, I haven’t found many of the tools I have experimented with previously particularly useful for academic writing. Idea generation was the main benefit I found from interacting with such tools, but it hasn’t meaningfully reduced the time I spend conducting academic research and writing to this point.

I decided that perhaps I was misguided in attempting to use general purpose AI tools for such a specific and niche purpose.

I began to explore tools specifically geared towards academic writing and found a number of promising AI programs to help with the more tedious parts of writing a journal article.

1) jenni.ai. Perhaps I’m biased for my namesake but jenni.ai was the first ai software program this Jenny found at all useful for academic writing assistance. The mission jenni.ai founders state is to “usher in a new era of creativity through artificial human intelligence.”

What makes this AI software special? You can have a “conversation” with the program while constructing your paper.

The program has a prompt asking “What are you writing today.” I prompted it with “an essay about AI programs for academic faculty, journal article writing.” It let me know when the prompt was good enough for the program to work with.

It began writing line by line, allowing me to accept the line or see the alternative.

In addition to letting you edit the text, you can ask the program to cite what it writes, write more in depth, with an opposing argument, a conclusion or an introduction.

Jenni also has a free and premium version.

2) Elicit.org The goal of the Elicit program is to use language models to automate parts of the research process, like literature reviews. Elicit is often used for finding references and defining research directions. The software can summarize key takeaways from the papers it references.

And “Elicit is an AI assistant for researchers and academics.”

When logging onto Elicit, you can either ask the software a question and have it search it’s database of research papers or upload your own research paper to have the software scan it.

I asked the software “ How are students using AI in the college classroom” and it returned 4 academic papers discussing college student perceptions of AI in the classroom. Next to these papers were a one sentence summary of what the focus of the paper was about.

Next to the abstract summary option was a menu of outcomes from these papers you cold add like “Intervention, Outcomes measured and Number of Participants.”

I could definitely see the utility in using this program to write something like a meta-analysis!

And Elicit is free to use!

3) Research Rabbit. The founders have called Research Rabbit the “Spotify of Research.” Research Rabbit visualizes scholarly networks of topics, papers and authors.

When searching for a topic, the papers that were displayed to me were not really what I was looking for. When I searched for a specific paper, it allowed me to add the paper to my collection then gathered 1162 similar papers, 8 papers by the original paper’s authors and 10 additional works by suggested authors.

Who wants to do a meta analysis!!

4) Scite.ai Scite is an AI program built for citing your references, as the name would imply! After being asked a question, Scite will give a response with a list of all the references cited in the response. The software also corrects inaccurate claims by showing and tabulating the instances in which a claim has been refuted.

Scite costs a bit. The software currently has a free week long trial but afterwards will cost you $20 a month.

Clarification on what journals consider ethical use of AI for academic manuscripts is coming.

While we wait, these tools seem like powerful ways to speed up your literature review! I have been toying around with a new research project for a couple of months now. I’ll see how AI helps me speed up my study completion!