AI-Enhanced Academic Writing: A Step-By-Step Guide for Writing in Half the Time

writing in Academia is inherently messy you have to come up with references you have to come up with Pros you have to come up with evidence to support what you're saying so there is a lot of to and fro you may find something that you didn't even know about that you want to include after you've written a large portion of your introduction or your literature review for example and here's the process that I would use in Academia if I wanted to make sure that this process was as streamlined as it could possibly be the first thing that I like to do is have a look to see what has already been published that I can use to structure my own response there's no point Reinventing the wheel and large language models are perfect at coming up with the structures that you need so I like to use gpt4 Advanced Data analysis here you can add a file and that file in this case is going to be an Excel document with different examples of what I want to write for example here I've got abstracts and I've got these from my own papers essentially we need a couple of examples that we can put into chat GPT which would then give us an opportunity to structure our own response so I've got this I put it into chat GPT by clicking here and ultimately I end up with this prompt and I'm going to put all of these prompts in the description below for you to use this is a file containing multiple abstracts from scientific papers use these abstracts to create a scaffold from which someone with no experience could structure their own abstract for their paper so as you can see it goes through it says a couple of questions like yes would you like to identify common structural elements yes please great let's continue and so it works all the way down and you can see here we've got abstract one and then it's broken it down into what is actually the structure introduction or background objective or aim methods results and it does that for both abstracts and then I've asked it here hey can you create an a scaffold for a scientific abstract and this is what it looks like if you can put it into a table if you prefer that but essentially that is what we're using to structure our own academic writing it's so easy if you just look at what people have already done it doesn't just work for abstracts you can do this for introductions for example so I did exactly the same thing for introductions I got introductions in an Excel document and I just pasted them in here you can see these are the same papers that I got my abstracts from but essentially we put it in using exactly the same prompts and this is a file containing multiple introductions from scientific papers use these introductions to create a scaffold from which someone with no experience could structure their own introductions for their papers it goes through goes through goes through and at one point it actually said hey look there's a lot of input that's been truncated however I can still identify structural elements often found in scientific papers from my training data no we don't want that so I said no please use the data provided then it apologizes and then it uses the actual data that I provided so a little bit of a trick if you find you need to sort of like go back and forth with chat GPT here we've got background information problems statement and it's done that for both of the different introductions and you can see here that I said put it in a table and so here we've got section background information problem statement significance Gap in literature method methodology preview and outline of contributions But ultimately this is what I'm going to use to structure my own response so scaffolding and coming up with examples from the literature that have been accepted in different peer-reviewed journals or have been accepted where you want your publication to go is a great way to start and that is how I would first use any AI tool to do this you can also do this in Julius AI so if you don't pay for chat GPT plus you can also do this in Julius AR you can see here I did exactly the same thing I put in my abstract and I said exactly the same prompt this is a file containing multiple abstracts blah blah blah and then it goes through and exactly the same thing it's come up with and then here it's got an example with the uh each section from the abstracts that I've put in so it does it a little bit differently but ultimately it's the same outcome it gives you a structure by which you can work with Julius AI is free at the moment but if you can pay for plus it's a really great tool once you've got your scaffold you've got to ask yourself right now I need to start writing so you know what you need to write now you just need to generate the words and there's a few tools that I would use to do this the first one obviously is chat GPT so here for example I could say I'm currently writing an abstract for a paper and needs help writing the abstract create a referenced introduction or background statement about the organic photovoltaic devices that I could use for the first two sentences so here we can see that it says in the Quest for sustainable and renewable energy sources blah blah blah so it's come up with that first thing it has a ref referenced it hasn't provided me with references this is default 3.5 so it's free for most people to use and I can actually prompt it a little bit more by giving a little bit more information about my particular study for example it says here I'm currently writing an abstract for a paper and I need an introduction and I need to State the problem or challenge that my research addresses in my case removing the need for harmful solvents during manufacture and using water disperse semiconducting nanoparticles so here you can see it's come up with a load of information that we could just simply cut and paste into a working file and that's what I've got right here I did this with the abstract I did this with the introduction and I've got this working file and I'm just going backwards and forwards backwards and forwards asking myself what I need and then looking at chat GPT or any other AI tool that I'm using to help workers like a researcher system with me to produce the text and then the next step is to reference it and that goes backwards and forwards for ages so if you get stuck in that Loop that is a good place to be means you're refining your ideas you're refining the arguments you're putting forward and you're looking more at the literature that has been published before so that is just the nature of academic writing it's very very messy there are a few other places that do a lot better than chat GPT for actually referencing what they write so for example if you want something free you can look at perplexity.ai and you can see I've put in the same prompt where I'm saying look I need to introduce the field of study and then I need to State the problem this is the problem that my research addresses and you can see it's come up here with an abstract that I could potentially use now the thing is if we go back to my reference sheet you can see that the citations aren't really useful I mean they're broad it's Wikipedia it's a gov site another Sigma Aldrich another Wikipedia it's got nature so this one's actually an article that I could reference but a lot of the time it really doesn't grab onto that scientific sort of credibility from papers that we need so we can use things like site so here you can see this is site.ai and I put in exactly the same prompt and it says here that it's got organic photovolta take devices blah blah blah so it's actually gone away and it's found as some references now the thing about all these references you can just blindly cite them you need to go and look at them that's part of the messiness that is Academia but you can just sort of like use this as a starting point so here we've got reference one reference two and it does sort of show you why it's mentioned these things so it is very important to actually sort of like read deeply into these references once you've actually cited them another tool you can use is mirror think I actually quite like mirror think you can see here I've put in the same prompt here I'm currently writing a paper for a peer review and Need help writing the introductions that tells the AI what I want to achieve it says the paper is about OPB devices and addresses removing the need for harmful solvents during manufacture and using water dispersed semiconducting nanoparticles so here I've said right the background information the problem statement and the significance where did I get these from well I got it from the scaffold that I created previously so if you look here I've gone in scaffold for introductions and this is exactly what I've asked it to do I want it to give us backbone information problem statements and significance so I'm using the scaffold to create the prompt that I'm putting back into any AI that I'm using so here mirror think you can see that's where I got that information from and then overall it's done a really bloody good job at uh just sort of like providing background information helping me with my problem statement and addressing the significance I copied and pasted this into my introduction section here you can see I've got the table here and this is what it's ended up with background information problems statement and significance let's just copied and paste in but the ultimate thing here once again it's not giving me references like a tool like site would so now I need to go and find those references and this is how I do that step finding references to support what you're saying is so very important that AI tools that I would use are first of all something like elicit so here I can see that all I need is something to support what I'm saying so ultimately I need something to support this sentence and I just sort of like copy and paste that sentence into elicit organic photovoltaic devices have emerged as a promising solution blah blah blah and I got that from the first sentence here organic photovoltaic devices have emerged as a promise solution so I've taken all of that sentence and I've put it into elicit and I think it's sorting it by relevance so here you can see this is a super new thing and it's about organic photophautate devices for indoor applications that's not something I've considered yet for my peer-reviewed paper so it may be worth reading this and putting in something about the applications and the novelty of opv if this paper tells me something that I didn't know about the field before and now this is a backwards and forwards backwards and forwards once I find something I read it is it interesting right put it for later is it interesting for this paper great put it in the paper the one thing I love about site is this prompt find a reference for this statement organic photo and blah blah blah put in that same thing and you can see it's come up with a load of references that I could include in my research article overall that is what I would do I would spend a lot of time going backwards and forwards in that text generation stage and finding references to support it and I'd go backwards and forwards backwards and forwards until I was confident enough that what I had written is not only credible it contains factual information and I have covered the information as outlined in the scaffold that I produced at the beginning and that's when it's ready to go after your supervisor for checking now that's all the academic writing you've got to do what about literature reviews well go check out this video where I talk about the tools that you can use to actually sort of like automate your literature review writing now it's automatic in the fact it will generate words but it's not automatic in the fact that you have to look over it to make sure that everything that it writes is factual true and represents your research and what you want to say so literature reviews are a bit of a different Beast you do have to sort of end up in that sort of like really sort of to and fro read the papers put them in uh re-jiggle what you're saying but ultimately using AI tools at every single step of that can really help improve your productivity and move things forward a lot quicker so there we are that's how I would use AI to write anything in Academia that I needed to write using AI tools is going to be the way of the future and I'd love to know what you think let me know in the comments below also remember there are more ways that you can engage with me the first way is to sign up to my newsletter head over to Andrew stapleton.com newsletter the link is in the description and when you sign up you'll get five emails over for about two weeks everything from the tools I've used the podcast I've been on and how to write the perfect abstract and more is exclusive content available for free so go sign up now and also head over to academiainsider.com that's my project where I've got my ebooks I've got my resource packs I've got the blog I've got a forum and it's all over there to make sure that Academia works for you all right then I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Andy Stapleton

Views: 56,944

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Id: Dm5zgBQoi_w

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023