How AI is Transforming the Way We Approach Academic and Scientific Writing

By Diana Akhmedjanova, Ph.D., Assistant Professor,
Department of Educational Programmes, Institute of Education, HSE. 

Here is the list: 

1. The title was generated by Rytr. I personally found it so appealing that I decided to use it after slight revisions. 
2. Such claims as reading with AI and ethical issues were borrowed from the outlines generated by Rytr, Good AI, and ChatGPT. 
3. I also used ChatPDF to get a general idea of several articles discussing ethics and AI. 
4. Finally, the editing process was performed with the help of QuillBot.

The permeation of tools relying on artificial intelligence (AI) across domains is staggering and might disorient some people, including scholars and researchers. Opponents of AI might feel threatened that AI could potentially replace some occupations, create a host of ethical issues, and lower the quality of education and research. Proponents of AI might strongly believe that the use of AI could greatly help people streamline some of the routine processes they have to perform in daily lives and work. Both camps make valid points, but it seems that in addition to a critical analysis of AI tools and what they can or cannot do for humanity, it is also prudent to learn how to use them and take advantage of their functions. This blog post describes some ways in which scholars, researchers, and students can use a selection of AI writing tools to transform their academic writing. 

This blog is organized around some useful writing tips and AI resources to use for such processes as reading, drafting, revising, and editing a research paper. However, before delving into the specifics, I would like to refer to the theoretical framework for using generative AI in education proposed by Su and Yung (2023). The authors suggest the following four steps to clarify how AI will be used: 

1. Identify desired outcomes – these are the goals for which you should use generative AI for your research writing purposes. For example, you do not have time to organize the reference list in your recent manuscript manually, so you decide to use Mendeley to automatically generate it based on citations in the text. 

2. Determine the level of automation – this is the extent to which you want to rely on AI. In the example above, you may choose to use Mendeley for some parts of your reference list and compile some other references manually. 

3. Ensure ethical considerations – these are possible consequences of only relying on AI when writing your research. Most publishers and journal editors would not mind if authors generated their references with the help of Mendeley. However, most of the respected academic journals have specific guidelines on the use of AI for research writing and urge their authors to disclose how AI has been used in preparing publications (Elsevier guidelines). 

4. Evaluate the effectiveness – that is, after using the AI tools, you should critically analyze if it helped you meet the goals you had in mind. For example, if the reference list was generated by Mendeley without mistakes, you might consider using it in your future articles to save time. If not, you might want to try Zotero instead. 

The four steps outlined above can help you understand why you want to use AI and what to take into account when working with such technologies. Now, let’s move on to the practical tips for reading and writing with generative AI. I propose the following steps for research writing using AI tools:

1. Reading with AI tools in preparation for writing 

2. Drafting with AI tools to create outlines, generate new ideas, and summarize some thoughts from other people’s work 

3. Revising with AI tools to revise for style and to check for plagiarism 

4. Editing with AI tools to eliminate minor problems with grammar and word choice and to use citation and reference generators 

Many tools described in this blog are free of charge or have free beta versions. However, most of these tools will require you to register on their websites and collect some of your personal information. You will need to consider the ethics of sharing your personal information, such as emails and maybe your names, with these companies.

1. Reading with AI

Since many readers of these blogs are scholars, researchers, and, hopefully, students interested in research, it is likely that many of you read extensively in your respective fields before writing. Obviously, all of us are incredibly busy with different tasks and responsibilities, and we often do not have much time to read our mounting collections of research articles, books, monographs, and dissertations. Our fellow AI researchers have developed several tools that can help us with academic reading such as ChatPDF and QuillBot. These tools can help you with reading once you upload the PDF versions of the articles, and ChatPDF or QuillBot can provide a summary of the main ideas. 

ChatPDF is designed to be interactive. That is, you can upload the PDF and ask AI questions you have about the text, and it will respond to your questions. Your questions must be specific and targeted; otherwise, ChatPDF will respond to you generally. It took me three questions to retrieve the main ideas discussed in the article on AI ethics (Figure 1). 

Figure 1
Conversation about the article with ChatPDF

QuillBot does not have the ability to converse with you since it provides a general summary of the text. However, you can further play with it when revising and editing your paper. Also, the free version of QuillBot allows you to use only 1200 words. To circumvent this limitation, instead of uploading the whole PDF, you can copy and paste the sections of the article that you are interested in. 

In addition to these tools, there is also a Research Rabbit, which creates a collection of related articles and papers based on the ones cited in the article you upload. It can also perform some initial analytics of how the authors, topics, and methods are related to each other by creating a network of nodes. Another useful AI-powered resource is the Consensus App, which also responds to research questions you ask. Its strength over other tools is that it makes a pool of several most cited articles based on the concepts you ask about and provides a general summary of findings (Figure 2). Again, your question should be specific enough so that the algorithms return the information you are looking for. I asked Consensus about whether AI tools improve research writing. The Сonsensus meter came back empty since there are not many empirical studies on this topic currently.

Figure 2
Consensus App

Based on my experiences with AI for reading, I recommend: 

1. Starting with a tool that can provide a general synthesis of research on your topic and concepts (Consensus). 

2. Reading publications by asking ChatPDF specific questions about the text or pasting specific passages in QuillBot. 

2. Drafting with AI 

Once you have all your readings finished and have a general idea of what to write, you should start drafting your paper. Sometimes it is incredibly difficult to start writing due to having too many ideas, not having ideas, or experiencing writer’s block. In my case, I was overwhelmed with all the ideas and knowledge I wanted to share with you in this blog post. Therefore, I turned to AI tools for drafting. I used three tools for creating outlines and generating some text. First, I went to Good AI to generate an academic outline for the argumentative essay by feeding the prompt “AI in research writing.” It created a very basic outline that heavily relied on some unsupported claims of “revolutionizing” research, but at the same time it mentioned such points as ethical considerations and “human expertise for quality research writing.” Next, I went to Rytr, which was not developed for research writing but included some interesting genres, such as blog posts. Surprisingly, Rytr created a more detailed outline using the same prompt and authored the title of this blog post. Finally, I decided to chat with ChatGPT-4 to see what it thought about AI supporting research writing. We had a lengthy conversation, and it reminded me that there are AI-powered reading tools, which I included in this text. 

In terms of drafting with AI, I recommend: 

Using several AI-powered tools, even low-quality ones, to generate, brainstorm, and outline ideas; they can mention some things that you have not thought about. 

3. Revising with AI

After writing your first draft, you should try revising your paper with the help of AI-powered tools. For example, WordTune can help you revise the style of your paper, making it more formal. In this blog, I used some casual language, and Figure 3 shows WordTune suggestions. QuillBot also has this option for premium users.

Figure 3
WordTune Suggestions on Formal Style

QuillBot has a plagiarism checker for premium users, but many of you can use the anti-plagiarism checker available at HSE. I strongly recommend using it to avoid surprises when you are submitting your articles to journals. QuillBot can also help you avoid plagiarism with the paraphrase function, which is limited in its free version to 125 words. However, you can still use it for a short paragraph, and QuillBot will suggest appropriate paraphrasing options. 

For revising with AI, I recommend: 

1. Checking your writing for style in WordTune and matching it with the requirements of the journal (in most cases, formal). 

2. Checking your draft for plagiarism through HSE services. 

Using QuillBot to paraphrase sentences or ideas coming from other sources.

4. Editing with AI

In the final stages of preparing your manuscript, edit it for possible grammar and word choice issues using QuillBot and/or WordTune. QuillBot also has a citation generator for websites, articles, and books. It generates both an in-text and a reference citation. However, I personally recommend using Mendeley or Zotero, which can be embedded with your Word documents. 

For editing with AI, I recommend: 

1. Editing your papers in short chunks – paste a paragraph or several sentences in QuillBot/WordTune to develop an understanding of the corrections they are making. They can fix some terminology which should not be corrected. 

2.  Checking and double-checking edits and citations: as ChatGPT stated “AI-generated content is not yet a substitute for expert human input,” which means you should always double-check what AI suggests. 

Final Thoughts

The human genius is trying to recreate itself using artificial intelligence to make human lives easier, more productive, and more creative. We have yet to see how AI is going to transform mundane tasks, even for researchers. This blog post attempted to provide some useful resources and tips on how to use AI-powered tools to facilitate and, hopefully, transform research writing. At the same time, I want to warn readers against over-relying on such tools. Also, there are a whole host of ethical issues and possible consequences of using these tools, but we need time and rigorous research studies to identify the long-term effects of AI tools on human activity. Even though I used some of the ideas generated by all the described AI tools, I wrote this article on my own and thoroughly enjoyed the process. Indeed, AI tools can help streamline some of the writing processes, including reading, drafting, revising, and editing. Just keep in mind that these are just tools that serve specific purposes for specific tasks that might take longer to do “manually.” After all, you are the experts and creators of knowledge and skills. Happy writing!   

Sources

Su, J., & Yang, W. (2023). Unlocking the power of ChatGPT: A framework for applying generative AI in education. ECNU Review of Education, 20965311231168423.