Supercharge your research with AI
In today’s fast-paced academia, failing to keep up with AI tools might put you behind. I see no reason not to utilize existing AI tools to accelerate your research progress. Here are the top 5 ways one can leverage exisiting AI tools for expediting their research.
Many times during your research career, you'll face the challenge of working in a completely new domain where you lack expertise. Feeling compelled to learn everything from scratch by investing hours in fundamental books or new online courses might seem tempting. However, that's the last thing one should do; after all, no one pays you to learn new things—it's about the results in the end (journal publications and grant money). You need to adjust your learning approach as you're no longer in school.
Reimagine using tools like ChatGPT as a virtual mentor that is instantly present to fine-tune your understanding. The best approach is to pick up a few research papers of your interest, understand the underlying commonalities, develop combinations of research questions, and fine-tune your understanding with ChatGPT prompts. Tip: Start with basic questions and slowly make your prompts more complex; most of the time, it works.
As the saying goes, “A code is written once and read multiple times.” If you're in an active coding group, using existing codes and fine-tuning them as per your needs may be necessary. The challenge arises when the code is written in a language you're not accustomed to. Most of the time, you might feel, “I understand a little bit of it but not completely.” Again, there's no need to pick up a new coding book to learn from scratch; use chunks of your code and ask ChatGPT to explain them to you. Start by providing ChatGPT with some background before pasting the code.
No one cares how long you took to write a basic line of code; what matters is analyzing the result. Unless you aim to become a professional coder, you don’t need to waste hours learning basics from old-school methods. Use existing codes, improve them, and move on.
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A tool like Litmaps is akin to Google Scholar on steroids. It saves you from the effort of clicking on multiple articles, reading abstracts, and deciding if you want to delve further. AI tools simplify your life by extracting basic information. Once you input the information of the seed article, it extracts results of relevant papers which, with one click, expands the abstract, allowing you to create a library of papers to read further. It also provides a beautiful map of the timeline of how this research work might have developed. Attached is a snippet of the maps. Save yourself tons of boredom in doing literature reviews and focus more on reading by minimizing the manual labor.
No more writer's block or spending hours fixing basic grammatical errors, especially if English is not your first language. Personally, no matter how much I try, I always mess up with articles here and there. So, use ChatGPT for your own good. Write as much as possible without giving too much thought to the structure or grammatical errors. Once you're satisfied with the content, ask ChatGPT to fix the structure and be sure to read it to keep the meaning consistent. Tip: Ask ChatGPT to maintain a mix of short and long sentences, avoid unnecessarily complex vocabulary, and ensure the flow of structure remains consistent without introducing new context.
This is especially helpful for new researchers daunted by the task of giving structure to their thoughts. Asking ChatGPT to create an initial structure for your next journal article might be worth trying. If you have a word limit or a specific type of article, manuscript structure plays a vital role in communicating your thought process. For researchers with limited publication experience, this will be a useful trick to develop the initial structure of your paper, which can be fine-tuned with support from your busy peers.
I hope that some of these discussed points are useful to some of you out there. Stay tuned for research-related posts, and don’t forget to add your valuable insights through comments if you have some other useful suggestions.
Thanks for sharing, Jay! Love your description as "Google Scholar on steroids"!