Responsible Literature Searching Guide

Limitations & Questions

• Be careful about uploaded full-text articles into an AI tool. You may violate copyright or license agreements. Also, be careful about uploading your original research data/manuscript. Unless it is an closed model or there is an enterprise agreement, there is always the possibility the company can retain your data and use it to train their tool.
• AI can misinterpret metrics due to their overreliance on quantitative indicators, which may fail to consider real-world education, policy, or community impacts.
• Do not become overdependent on AI. Apply your creativity and critical thinking.
• AI tools may introduce bias into data curation and oversimplify the metadata tagging process, leading to misclassification.
• There are a lack of transparency and standards for AI-powered data curation and automated scraping and tagging, leading to many ethical and security concerns.

Why These, Not Those?

• Most chatbots be can be utilized for this research task, but we recommended Copilot due to UTSW work data protection and integration with other Microsoft 365 applications.
• Scopus and Web of Science/JCR are the standard core databases for research impact and metrics. They maintain extensive citation networks that current AI are unable to replicate.
• You can receive more support for the use of these tools through consultation with a librarian or vendor support lines.

Note: All AI can hallucinate, provide poor quality outputs, or oversimplify complex topics. Apply critical analysis to any output.

Use the ROBOT test to evaluate AI tools.

You can ask the AI to do the following:

• Assist with translating your text into another language.
• Assist with the generation of images and other visuals. Most AI chatbots have an image (and often video) generator integrated directly into the tool.
• Create draft proposals or format content for different platforms, such as social media, blog posts, or news releases/articles. You can also have the AI translate your research into other formats more accessible to the general public.

Check out other chatbots for these processes.

Research Metrics

Use these tools to evaluate the impact of your research and find author-, article-, and journal-level metrics.

Research and Data Sharing

Use these tools to store and highlight your research and connected data.