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Generative AI and Research

Giving credit

A big component of academic integrity is giving credit to your sources, usually through formal citation. What role can AI play in this aspect of your research? 

Citing AI

First, if you use AI, do you need to cite it? If so, how? 

The simple but probably unsatisfying answer is that it depends. Different professors will have different expectations and it’s always a good idea to check with them about what they would like you to do. 

If they do expect you to cite AI, there are recommended ways to do that for many common citation styles.

The more complicated answer is that the question of whether to cite AI is one that’s still be debated by various scholarly and academic communities and different disciplines may end up following different practices. 

The purpose of citation, remember, is about giving credit to the ideas of other authors. The common thinking right now is that a) AI generates information—it doesn’t create or author information and b) AI doesn’t have ideas. So citing AI the same way you would a traditional source doesn’t really make sense. 

Instead, the current trend is more toward giving acknowledgment to AI by disclosing how it was used as part of the research and writing process. This disclosure can take many different forms, from a note at the beginning or end of a paper or presentation or as part of the text itself. 

Using AI for citation

Citation is hard. Understanding how to format a citation and where to place it and paying attention to all the little details like capitalization and punctuation can be time-consuming. 

Luckily, there are many tools available that can assist with the citation process, including citation management tools like Zotero and example citations that can be found in some library databases. Generative AI can serve a similar role. 

However, as with any citation tool, you shouldn’t assume that a citation created by generative AI is a hundred percent accurate in terms of formatting. Depending on how much information you give it about the source, generative AI can also try to add information or change information order to fill in gaps, further damaging the accuracy of the citation. 

So while you can use generative AI for citation, making sure those citations are correct requires caution and vigilance. Always check the citation against an outside source such as Purdue OWL or a citation manual to make sure that it’s correct.