Skip to Main Content

Artificial Intelligence: AI and Faculty

AI and Information Seeking for Faculty

Faculty members are encouraged to engage with their Head of Faculty or Line Manager, as well as the IADT Teaching and Learning Committee, to gain insights on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) within teaching, learning, and assessment approaches. This section of the LibGuide provides information regarding the implications of AI for information-seeking processes related to research and publication. While this LibGuide on AI primarily targets students, it includes sections that are also useful for faculty, such as:

  • Useful AI Platforms: A curated list of useful AI tools including valuable platforms for research such as Elicit AI and Connected papers, available here.
  • AI and Literature Reviews: Guidance on how to effectively incorporate AI into the literature review process, available here. 

AI for Research

AI Support for Research Development

AI tools can assist faculty in developing research questions and objectives, as well as brainstorming potential methodologies. This support enables researchers to clarify their focus and approach early in the research process. AI platforms retrieve information resources of variable quality and reliability however. It is important to prioritise IADT Library's academic databases. See further information on the limitations of AI here.

Literature Review Assistance

Platforms such as Elicit AI and Connected Papers facilitate literature reviews by offering overviews of key papers within specific subject areas. Connected Papers, in particular, visualises the relationships between these papers, helping researchers understand the academic landscape and identify relevant studies efficiently. See videos below.

Editing and Maintaining Research Integrity

While AI can aid in editing, it is crucial to maintain research integrity. Faculty should ensure that use of AI is ethically sound and acknowledged, maintaining the quality and credibility of their work.

Data Analysis and Visualisation

AI tools can analyse data sets and produce visualisations, simplifying the interpretation of complex information. This capability allows researchers to uncover patterns and insights that may not be immediately apparent. It is also important to consider the limitations of AI in this respect such as bias and the potential for errors.

AI and Scholarly Publishing

Dr Lai Mai in a short commentary entitled: View of Generative AI for Academic Publishing? Some Thoughts About Epistemic Diversity and the Pursuit of Truth (uvic.ca), discusses the impact of AI on academic publishing in relation to diminished bibliodiversity, epistemic diversity, and increased data surveillance. Invoking the Sokal hoax, the commentary also cautions against the potential erosion of public trust in academic publishing in the age of generative AI.

In a reflection entitled 'Flood of 'junk': How AI is changing scientific publishing,' Daniel Lawlor highlights concerns about AI's impact on scientific publishing, leading to an influx of low-quality and plagiarised papers. Notable incidents include bizarre AI-generated content published in reputable journals and a study published by Elsevier which went viral in March for its introduction, which was clearly a ChatGPT prompt that read: "Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic."

AI is being used by numerous academic publishers to support:

  • Manuscript submission
  • Sourcing reviewers
  • Detecting image manipulation and checking methods
  • Automated copyediting and proofing
  • Post-publication search, recommendation, and summarisation

Human oversight remains essential however to:

  • Mitigate AI mistakes and biases
  • Maintaining human control and accountability
  • Upholding publishing ethics and standards

To find out more about the impact of AI on scholarly publishing check out this piece by Scholarly Kitchen here which comprises an interview with:

  • Helen King (HK), Head of Transformation at SAGE Publishers who hosts the influential blog, PubTech Radar
  • Lucy Lu Wang (LLW), Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School and visiting researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, who helped build the influential and innovative ‘Semantic Scholar’ platform and helps lead a number of workshops on natural language processing of scholarly text, including the SDP and SciNLP Workshops
  • Paul Groth (PG), Professor of Algorithmic Data Science at the University of Amsterdam, and scientific director of the UvA Data Science Center. He previously worked as Disruptive Technologies Director at Elsevier and is a former Board member of Force11

AI and Research Ethics

Faculty seeking to publish in the academic literature are advised to consult the guidelines of individual publishers in relation to the use of AI. The majority of academic publishers adhere to guidelines issued by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

COPE Position Statement on Authorship and AI Tools (2023)

"The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or Large Language Models in research publications is expanding rapidly. COPE joins organisations, such as WAME and the JAMA Network among others, to state that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper.
AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.
Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics."

Connected Papers

Andy Stapleton (2024). First Time User's Guide to Connected Papers for Research. Youtube. https://youtu.be/RWu5eA-j7yU

Elict AI

Elicit AI.(2024). Using Elicit to find hundreds of relevant academic papers. Youtube. https://youtu.be/kI6wG46ua2E?si=oaEmT1PHwL-QlgF_