Artificial Intelligence (AI): How AI Can Help You With Research Tasks

To get started in thinking about a topic, you can enter a prompt into an AI tool and see what it suggests. Sometimes you will have very direct guidance from an instructor on the general area you should be researching, and other times you will have free reign to choose your own topic. In either case, you can use AI to help you think through the right topic to follow.

This guidance was originally written for ChatGPT, but we'll use Perplexity instead (since it does not require a login).

An effective prompt could look like this:

Act as an expert academic librarian. I’m writing a research paper for [course] and I need help coming up with a topic. I’m interested in topics related to [subject]. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to that.

Here’s an example:
Act as an expert academic librarian. I’m writing a research paper for Sociology and I need help coming up with a topic. I’m interested in topics related to climate change. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to that.

1. Paste your prompt into Perplexity.
2. Look over the list it gives you and find one topic that you’re interested in. If there isn’t one, ask Perplexity to give you more topics. Keep going until you find a topic you like. Here is the response to the prompt from Perplexity.
3. Now tell Perplexity which of those topics you want to use. 
4. Example: I like the topic, "Corporate social responsibility in the era of climate change."
5. Then it will give you some sub-topics or research questions. If it doesn’t, ask for some.
6. Choose your specific research question from the list. If you don’t like any of them, ask for more. Keep going until you find one you want to use. And remember that you can shape any of the questions in your own direction (you can combine things to fit your interests better than the AI can).

(This activity is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY license by the University of Arizona Libraries.

If you've decided on a topic, but you are not finding the type of information you expected (whether articles, sites, books, etc.), let’s see if artificial intelligence (AI) can help us with this process. Go to the Perplexity AI tool (I chose Perplexity because it does not require you to set up an account). 

Enter an explanation of your search topic you are researching into Perplexity, maybe a sentence or two that explains what you are looking for. Then ask it to provide you with ten terms you could use when searching for information on that topic. Make note of any that could be helpful in your searching. Here is an example of a query or prompt to Perplexity (not perfect, but it gets at the idea of how to ask for this information):

If I were looking for information on the history and future of electric vehicles in america, paying attention to both technological developments, potential new suppliers, and marketing approaches, what are ten terms I might use to find articles and other information, in order to write an undergraduate paper for a college course?

You'll see in the example above that there is an explanation of the topic, but also the types of sources you are looking for, and what your purpose is (what you will do with information on the topic once you find it). The more detail you provide to the AI tool, the better your results will be (at least in terms of fitting your expectations and purpose).

Here is Perplexity's response to the prompt.

One way to help you quickly understand the articles or sites you find about your topic is to get a quick summary of them. It's true that many articles in library databases will include a brief abstract that summarizes the contents of the article. Now, what you can also do with these AI sites is to ask questions about a document related to your research, such as "does the article explain what carbon capture means?" or anything you are wondering whether the document includes. The following links will take you to AI tools that summarize PDFs or other text:

Planning your time to complete a research assignment can be tricky. It's important to understand the steps involved and a rough idea of how much time to allow. We all work differently, so an average estimate of the time may not fit your abilities or available time. But having a rough idea of time to allow can help you fit the tasks into your own perspective and calendar.

I suggest trying a prompt like this with Perplexity:

I am an undergraduate student working on a five page research paper. I am trying to plan the best way to organize my time and get research tasks done. Could you create a list of steps for me that would be needed to create a topic, research the topic, and write a paper on the topic, along with estimated time needed to complete each step?

Here is Perplexity's response to that prompt.

Try changing out the length of the assignment, and also entering your topic as part of the prompt. You can also try entering an amount of time that you have available to work on the assignment, and see if you can get suggestions on how to best fit your research work into that time period.

One thing to be careful about: keep in mind that any personal information you enter into a generative AI tool can be saved and become part of other responses. Just be aware of this before you post your daily schedule with your name and address.

Now, these resources are a bit of a cheat, in that they are not examples of generative AI tools. But these citation generators do contain a lot of knowledge about how different citation systems work, and how to incorporate the information you provide into a working citation. We are fortunate that many of our library databases will automatically provide you with citations, but if you are citing a website or an article or book you find elsewhere, these do an excellent job. 

One thing to note: each generator asks you to fill out a form with your citation elements (like title, author, date of publication, etc.). If you have any difficulty in finding an element to include, ask a librarian!

Use the following sites to quickly build a citation in the citation style you need to add to your bibliography/source list:

Citefast - free citation generator

ZoteroBib - build a bibliography instantly from any computer or device, without creating an account or installing any software.

Citation Builder - free citation generator from North Carolina State University Libraries