Research Tools & Practices

CS 3997, Catherine Gracey

I'm going to cover:

• Research Tools & Strategies
• Academic Integrity

And then Shadi will talk about:

• Technical Communication 
• Reports & Presentations

Today's Agenda

• Literal search for only the tokens you put in
• If you search 'wife' variations like 'wives' will not be searched
• High level of specificity and control
• Harder to use

Keyword Search

• Accounts for 'meaning' of terms, will search for variations
• If you search 'wife' search would include 'wives' 'spouse' 'partner'
• Less control, easy to use

• Search using keywords
• Results are only returned if keyword appears in text
• No 'judgement' from system on what's relevant, it shows it all

Traditional Databases

"artificial intelligence" AND "diagnosis"

Bibliographic Databases

Curated, contain peer-reviewed content

• wide breadth
• excellent for very general research questions
• not necessarily going to have all CS content

Multi-disciplinary

• curated to only contain works published by CS researchers or presented at CS conferences
• usually your go to option, ACM, IEEE

• Search using natural language (semantic)
• Results that contain similar words are returned 
• Results are pre-sorted by perceived relevance
• Search engine optimization at play

*the word diagnosis doesn't actually appear, but ML is used to determine that this is about diagnosis

• NOT designed as a search tool
• Was traditionally generating output based on training data alone
• Done by predicting which word should come next
• Hallucinations very likely

LLMs (Chatbots)

Types of Hallucinations

Fake Sources

Types of Hallucinations

Incorrect Facts

Types of Hallucinations

• Highly reduces, or prevents first two types of hallucinations
• Supplements LLMs with an external search
• Results that contain similar words are returned due to Machine Learning
• Outputs can be traced to specific sources

Not all RAG tools are created equally, it's essential to look at what corpus they are searching

For instance, the basic perplexity version searches the internet to answer your questions, meaning information could be based on lots of kinds of sources (social media, etc.)

Perplexity Sources

• There are a number of tools designed specifically for academic research
• The difference is that they search a more curated corpus that only contains scholarly or peer-reviewed works
• Some generalized tools (Perplexity Academic) offer options that do this as well

Academic RAG tools

ScopusAI (an Academic Example)

Your task, you have 7 minutes to test one of these out in a small group, then we'll report back about:

• Your general thoughts
• How easy it was to use
• How happy you were with the results
• What you do/don't like about the tool

* Must be accessed via the library

1. Ideation 

• Tool:
  • ChatGPT
  • Perplexity
• Usecases: 
  • Brainstorm
  • Research Question Generation
  • Keyword Generation

AI Driven Academic Research Workflow

2. Initial Discovery

• Tool:
  • Databases (Scopus, ACM, IEEE, etc.)
  • Academic RAG tools (Consensus, Elicit, etc.)
• Usecases: 
  • Gather an initial reference list, or target articles

AI Driven Academic Research Workflow

3. Organization & Management

• Tool:
  • Zotero!
• Usecases: 
  • Store papers
  • Generate references
  • Connect to Lit Mapper

AI Driven Academic Research Workflow

4. Landscape Mapping

• Tool:
  • Research Rabbit
  • Connected Papers
  • Litmaps
• Usecases: 
  • See if you've missed any key papers or authors

AI Driven Academic Research Workflow

5. Information Synthesis

• Tool:
  • Elicit
  • Consensus
• Usecases: 
  • Synthesize findings
  • Extract key themes, methodologies, etc.

AI Driven Academic Research Workflow

6. Context Check 

• Tool:
  • Your brain!
  • Elicit
• Usecases: 
  • Verify that chosen sources are legitimate, reliable, etc.
  • See how the academic community has recieved the papers

AI Driven Academic Research Workflow

The current UNB Academic Misconduct policy doesn't mention AI

This is likely to change very soon (the new policy is going to Senate soon)

What does this mean for you?

*We'll come back to this in a second

• They set the standards & best practices in Academia
  • Most of your instructors are researchers, so will likely follow these best practices
• If you want to go on to publish, you'll need to be familiar with their policies

Why do we care about publishers as students?

[a]

• Can't be listed as an author
• Should not be cited as an information source (cite the original source)
• Use should be acknowledged in a statement 
• Should not be used for peer-review (privacy issues)

Authorship standards

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Why can't AI be an author?

Criteria 4 (and 3) are why, AI cannot accept responsibility, or be held accountable

If AI can't be an author, then can it be cited?

This is an active debate in the academic community

So how do I acknowledge?

So how do I cite?

• It depends on the citation style!
• If possible - keep records of your chats (via permalinks)
• Refer to the Academic Integrity Guide for links on how to cite in each citation style

In APA, the template is:

AI Company Name. (year, month day). Title of chat in italics [Description, such as Generative AI chat]. Tool Name/Model. URL of the chat

An example:

OpenAI. (2025, August 21). High school grammar concepts [Generative AI chat]. ChatGPT. https://chatgpt.com/share/68a77b60-0ee4-800c-9acc-cd3fd573c311

The use of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in an article (including but not limited to text, figures, images, and code) shall be disclosed in the acknowledgments section of any article submitted to an IEEE publication. The AI system used shall be identified, and specific sections of the article that use AI-generated content shall be identified and accompanied by a brief explanation regarding the level at which the AI system was used to generate the content. The use of AI systems for editing and grammar enhancement is common practice and, as such, is generally outside the intent of the above policy. In this case, disclosure as noted above is recommended.  An example of this wording is as follows:

Article

Fig. caption:  Graphic(s) created using AI-generation. For image credits, please see the Acknowledgment section of this article.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Fig. X was created using <AI system used>.  <Brief explanation regarding the level at which the AI system was used to generate the content.>

Thank You!

Please contact me with any questions you have @ catherine.gracey@unb.ca