Guide / Method

AI tools for researchers

In 1997 I was put in front of a computer with internet for the first time and it felt like magic: you typed a word and information from all over the world appeared. There was the same wariness then that there is now with AI (“students will copy, this is not reliable”). And, as then, whoever learned to use it well gained a huge advantage. With AI it is the same. Here is how to use it with judgement.

This is the essentials, the framework I use, not a treatise. Just enough to start well and not waste time. The detail of your own case is what we work through in mentoring.

The frame: a tool, not a substitute

AI does not do research for you, just as the internet did not earn the degree for you. It is a multiplier: it makes a good researcher more productive, and a careless one introduce more errors faster. The difference is you. Use it to take the mechanical part off your plate and reserve your head for what genuinely needs judgement.

Where it really delivers

• Writing. Unblocking the blank page, structuring ideas, improving the clarity of a draft, adapting the tone. Not to write for you, but so you write better and sooner.
• Literature. Summarising papers, finding connections, getting up to speed fast in a new topic. Always verifying: AI invents references with total confidence.
• Review. An AI can give you a first review of your own paper before submitting, flagging gaps and weak parts. Like a draft reviewer who never tires.
• Code. Programming and automating analyses, scripts, plots. Here the productivity jump is enormous for anyone who is not a programmer by trade.
• Funding. Help to structure proposals, polish the language and stick to what the call asks for.

The limit you cannot cross

AI is confident when it is wrong: it gives you a false reference or an invented figure with the same poise as a correct one. The golden rule: use it to accelerate, never to delegate judgement. Anything that goes out with your name on it, you verify yourself. That responsibility is not automatable.