AI for Literature Review Workshop
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the various emerging research topics and has become trending. This tool has been adopted for educational and non-educational purposes despite their cons, such as bias, fairness, and ethical concerns (Ferrara, 2023). In education, students use AI-generated tools such as AI chatbots, AI writing generators, and AI image generators because they believe those tools ease their work. For example, Grammarly helps students check their essays in terms of grammar, punctuation, and other mechanics in writing. The tool can also assist students in determining the tone and register for which students aim their writing. However, on Wednesday, October 23, 2024, I joined a workshop beyond correcting grammar and punctuation. Still, the topic was the same: AI used in education, particularly for academic writing at the higher education level, bringing a theme of AI Tools for Lit Reviews. The workshop was part of professional development activities offered by the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Professional Development at Purdue.
We explored how AI tools in the market can be used to assist students in writing literature reviews. I need this knowledge, skills, and competence as a graduate student. The AI tools that we explored were Perplexity, Scite, Research Rabbit, and NotebookLM. I moderately understood Perplexity since I have been using it as one of the AI chatbots but not for the other two. We were guided on how to use the tools. It was more on the introduction to the tools. However, the experience I gained from the workshop ignited my motivation to explore the tools further and see how valuable they are for literature review purposes and academic writing in general. Besides studying the tools, the presenters also overviewed AI and its limitations, particularly for ChatGPT. The literacy about this aspect allows us to be mindful when using the tool. I am also happy knowing that the Purdue library will enable us to access Perplexity for the professional version.
The workshop was extraordinary since I learned a lot from it. Perplexity is another chatbot machine where we can ask anything to it. To ensure that the outcome from the tool meets our needs, we need to have a good prompt where we are expected to use a prompt framework. The more detailed and contextual the prompt, the better results we will have for the outcomes. Then, we had a quick guide to Scite, the AI-based tool that help us in finding reputable articles for research. After that, we went through Research Rabbit and NotebookLM. The function of Research Rabbit is for citation mapping. At the same time, NotebookLM can synthesize information from our data. It was a swift-moving presentation; I could catch only some parts, yet I was glad I joined this one-hour-long online workshop.
In Spring 2025, I will take a literature review course. After attending this workshop, I acquired valuable tools to incorporate during that class. The workshop becomes a good start before taking the class, significantly enhancing my skills and competency in the literature review. I hope that they will be sharpened once I take the literature class. In addition, it becomes a venue for my other professional development activities during my career as a PhD student at Purdue. Even though the AI workshop gave me hints on how to use technology to do a literature review, I still want to learn the traditional strategy for doing a literature review. Therefore, instead of feeling satisfied with the current understanding of using AI for literature review, I am still eager to learn more by taking the class and combining what I earn from the class and from the workshop. After all, I must embrace technology such as the AI tool for academic writing purposes. As stated by Shopovski (2024), they can ease our work, and I want to prove that and be part of those who always continue learning.
References
Ferrara, E. (2023). Fairness and bias in artificial intelligence: A brief survey of sources, impacts, and mitigation strategies. Sci, 6(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/sci6010003
Shopovski, J. (2024). Generative artificial Intelligence, AI for scientific writing: A literature review. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202406.0011.v1
Comments
Post a Comment