This guide from York University Libraries is intended to help students enhance their understanding of generative AI (Gen AI) tools in the context of using them for research
More specifically this guide offers students:
An introduction to generative AI (GenAI) technology and tools, including an overview of their benefits and limitations for research tasks: Starting with an introduction to GenAI and an overview of various AI tools, the guide offers key considerations for integrating these tools into research, addressing both the advantages of using them and where these tools fall down when pursuing research. Types of research tasks might include brainstorming or narrowing a research topic, generating keywords or approaches to search strategy, doing background research, or more advanced tasks like automating research workflows, including tools to streamline reading articles, or to assist with literature reviews and literature mapping (see
Research Discovery & Workflow Tools).
Guidelines for academic integrity, citing and ethical use, including tips on verifying and evaluating what you find: To promote responsible use, this guide provides guidelines for ethical use and strategies for verifying and evaluating AI-generated content, to guide students in using it in a way that enhances rather than detracts from the quality of their research. The guide also offers guidance on properly citing GenAI, aligned with institutional standards and including various citation styles.
An overview of prompting strategies: The guide offers practical tips and links to frameworks and guidelines for crafting clearly defined prompts to generate relevant and meaningful results when using GenAI.
Information about Research Discovery & Workflow Tools: The guide moves beyond more mainstream GenAI tools like
ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Co-Pilot etc., discussed mainly in terms of their text generation capabilities, to cover
Research Discovery & Workflow Tools, a subset of AI tools that are constantly evolving. These tools typically use scholarly sources of data and offer functionality likely to appeal mainly to students pursuing more advanced research tasks like literature mapping, citation analysis, and more. These tools are not perfect and we always recommend you use them in tandem with York University Libraries' discovery layer,
Omni, and our
many databases.
