Use AI tools for research

How can I use AI tools responsibly?

This page is designed for students who are undertaking any form of literature review and would like to make use of AI tools to find a broader range of sources.

Along with all of the benefits of AI tools, there are some pitfalls to avoid, and some situations in which use of AI might not be appropriate at all. When using AI tools for research, you need to consider the quality of the information you’re getting and be honest about how you’re using it.

Remember, any use of tools should be in line with the University’s academic integrity policy and any specific guidance issued by your tutors (for example, AI tools might be allowed for one module but not for another). Complete the AI section of the Academic Integrity course on Moodle before using any of these tools in your work so that you can be confident that your use is ethical. The Centre for Academic Development also has guidance on how to use AI ethically.

Decorative cartoon of a woman sitting at a laptop

Use of AI (Moodle course)

Complete this online course to understand how to use AI tools responsibly at Oxford Brookes.

How can AI tools help with my assignment research?

There are now a huge range of AI tools available that aim to make work and study more efficient. Paid versions of tools offer more advanced capabilities, but it is not necessary to pay for a subscription to try many of these tools and use them to support your studies. If used responsibly, these tools can enhance your work and support your learning.

In the Library, we’re particularly interested in tools that help you find and review sources of information that might support your academic work - essentially, using AI to support literature searching.

These tools can:

Offer an alternative way to find literature, in combination with keyword searching using the subject-specific databases on your course resource help page. The two approaches can be complementary because the searching works differently, helping you to find more sources overall.
Allow you to upload a document, e.g. a journal article or a piece of your own work, and ask for suggestions for related sources
Help you to quickly review search results using AI summaries to see how relevant a paper might be to your research so that you can focus on the most useful sources
Make comparing sources more efficient, for example, comparing the methodologies used in two papers on the same topic
Support you to plan and carry out systematic reviews (a particular method of reviewing literature, often used in healthcare subjects). It's important to check whether it is permitted to use AI tools as part of this process for your module/project.

Key issues to consider

Are the sources real?

Some tools will generate references that look real but don’t really exist. Always find and check the original source.

Is the information accurate?

AI tools often make mistakes, and this is another reason why it's very important to check any sources that it provides and compare the information you’re getting to other sources.

Is there a bias?

AI tools replicate the perspectives of the information they are trained on, which might be biased towards particular ways of seeing the world (e.g. cultural biases towards Western sources). Using prompts, you can ask some AI tools to consider questions from different perspectives.

Which sources are included in the search?

Each tool will search a particular collection of literature, in a similar way to our databases. Some of the sources they find will be ‘open access’ (freely available to everyone online) and others will require a log in.

You might not have access to everything with your Oxford Brookes log in details, but we also have an interlibrary loans service you can use to borrow items from other universities.

Do watch out for sources that are not of a high academic quality. AI tools built on search engines like Google Scholar might include other student work and articles that are not peer-reviewed, which you should avoid.

Are the sources good quality?

Like other search tools outside the Library (for example Google Scholar), these tools might pick up articles from less reputable journals, or student work like dissertations. Some tools allow you to filter for ‘peer-reviewed’ articles or sort by citations (high numbers of citations are a good indicator of quality). You can use journal rankings websites like SJR to see how well respected a journal is.

Are you using sources in a way that is compatible with data protection and copyright?

Never enter confidential research data into these tools (for example data from research participants), and be careful about information you share about yourself. Think about whether you own the content you are uploading into these tools, and check privacy policies. If in doubt, contact the Library via library@brookes.ac.uk.

Are the tools helping you to learn?

Or are you relying too heavily on summaries to cut corners in your work? Do not copy and paste AI summaries of sources into your assignments - always check the original source. Copying and pasting like this is a breach of the academic integrity policy, and will also lead to poor quality assignments since you are likely to end up with disjointed text that does not properly answer your research question.

Can I 'cite' AI in my assignments?

When we talk about citation or referencing, we are usually talking about giving credit to sources that have been written, created or compiled by humans.

Generative AI is a bit different. AI is not an author, because it doesn’t generate original ideas or work and cannot take responsibility for its output. Instead, it compiles a written answer or a new piece of media (like an image, or a video) from previous work done by others in response to your prompts.

However, it is still very important to know how to ethically use AI as a tool, which involves acknowledging when and how you have used it in your work. For these reasons, we use the word ‘acknowledgement’ rather than ‘citation’ when referring to AI tools Please see our guide Acknowledging or citing AI? for details on how to properly acknowledge your use of AI.

Which tools do we suggest?

Tools based on large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini or CoPilot can help you to get a basic understanding of topics. Students have full access to a more data secure version of CoPilot through the university (details on how to sign up are available on the artificial intelligence page, under the section 'Making safe choices when choosing AI software').

The tools introduced below are designed to help you to find literature and understand how different sources relate to each other. They do this by adding a large language model (LLM) to a collection of academic papers. Each tool is explained below with links.

Some of these tools require prompting with questions to get suggestions for related sources, while others allow you to upload an article for the AI to analyse.

Oxford Brookes does not have a subscription to any of these tools. We are suggesting the free versions of these tools since we feel that they offer sufficient functionality without a subscription. These are tools that we think have useful functionality for students, but please be cautious in your use of them, especially as they may be subject to sudden changes that can affect your privacy.

Remember - always start with the Library databases (available through your course resource help page) and then move on to these tools to broaden your search.

The video Using AI tools for research will walk you through using AI to find information to answer a research question, starting with library database Web of Science and moving on to Research Rabbit, Keenious and Elicit.

Alert Please note the the ResearchRabbit and Keenious interfaces have recently changed and the video will be updated in due course.

Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is a free tool that allows you to collect references to add papers that you’ve read and see connections between them.

When you build up a collection of papers, it will generate a visual map which also highlights other papers you might have missed. All you need to do is add papers you have found useful or search by keyword, so it's the most similar to a standard literature database.

Then, follow the links to read the new articles - you might not have access to every suggested paper, but do remember that our interlibrary loans service can help.

Keenious

Keenious allows you to upload a document - either your own work or a published paper - and get suggestions for further literature on that topic. You can highlight particular sections of a document to get more specific recommendations.

Log in with your Google account to get access to the free tools. There are some limitations of the free version around the length of documents and the number of results offered.

Keenious processes and hosts prompts, messages, files, and AI responses within the European Union, and only stores these inputs for one day. Keenious does not use these inputs for training the model (this is not the case with every tool, so take care and always scan the terms and conditions).

Elicit

Elicit is primarily a literature searching tool, and now has some capability to generate 'report' summaries from multiple sources. Importantly, these reports showcase highlights from real academic sources, allowing easier comparison, rather than writing your work for you. The report functionality is limited on the free plan, so the main use for Elicit is still the literature searching tool.

Log in with your Google account. You can choose 'research report' (limited number per month) or 'find papers' (unlimited). The systematic review tool is only included with the paid plan, but the free plan should be enough for most students.

Useful filters include date, journal quality ranking, research type and keywords in the abstract. It will also evaluate the 'strength' of your question when you input it and suggest amendments.

We don't recommend uploading documents to this tool because of data privacy concerns, and urge users not to enter any confidential information.

NotebookLM

NotebookLM is a free Google product which allows you to analyse sources, including published work or your own. You can upload documents and generate study notes, mindmaps, flashcards, audio and video summaries, and quizzes to test yourself on your understanding of the information.

The audio summary, for example, is like listening to a podcast with two AI hosts who are talking about the paper. You can even interject to ask them your own questions.

You should be cautious about what you upload to NotebookLM, ensuring that you don't upload anything confidential or that you do not have the rights to share in order to respect data privacy and copyright.