Research takes ages when you’re doing it all by yourself. Locating resources, digesting them, recording information, compiling a bibliography, proofreading your report. It all builds up to hundreds of hours.
Several AI applications can save a significant proportion of this effort, assuming you carry out the false tasks yourself.
Consensus for Finding Real Academic Sources
Consensus is designed for academic research. Simply phrase your question to a search engine, as you would on Google, but with Consensus you won’t get a list of blogs and ads-you’ll receive insight from peer reviewed papers, with the source notedadjacent to each answer. What a step-up from Google when you need to know what all the research says about something rather than just someone’s opinionofthew-and a huge time-saver in the beginning stages of writing a paper when trying to determine previous research.
Perplexity for Quick Research With Citations
Perplexity is sort of like a search engine intermingled with a chatbot. You can ask it questions, and it will give you a written response and even hyperlink you to the source from where it came. For academic writing this is critical as you need to be able to follow every argument to an actual source. It would be incredibly helpful at the easy to get a feel for a topic and then do the nitty gritty work of narrowing your point.
Zotero for Managing Citations and Sources
Zotero is not new but it continues to improve, especially with handling citations for you. One click from your web browser and Zotero will archive the source and automatically retrieve the Title, author, date and more. Now when you need to write your bibliography it automatically formats everything to APA, MLA Chicago style whatever style you are required to follow. Wouldn’t that be nice in writing?
Grammarly for Catching Mistakes Before You Submit
Grammarly now does more than just spelling too. It considers sentence structure, tone, and clarity and flags up parts of your essay that are difficult to understand or where a sentence is too long. For research papers this is important as lecturers tend to mark on clarity as well as subject matter. Running your final draft through Grammarly before submitting will pick up little problems you may not notice after reading the same paragraph fifty times.
Turnitin and Originality Checkers
Since a lot of universities use Turnitin or one of the other plagiarism detection programs on all submitted essays, it a good idea to check your own work first. It’s not just a case of looking for accidental copying. It’ll catch areas where you paraphrased the source material too much without realizing, which people often do quite unintentionally. You realize this before it becomes a serious issue you can simply rewrite that part in your own words.
Using QuillBot for Paraphrasing the Right Way
QuillBot can assist you to paraphrase a sentence or paragraph so it appears in your own voice rather than being too similar to your source material. The essential thing is how it’s used. You should never copy/paste from a source and then have QuillBot produce a similar sounding replacement to cut and paste into your essay.
That remains plagiarism even if the content is rephrased.
Instead, use it to assist you to refine your own draft sentences your wrote in your own words to clarify your writing once you understand the concept.
A Note on Using AI the Right Way
None of these tools should be generating the substantive arguments of your paper. Professors are becoming more and more aware of how the general text produced by AI systems, and nearly all institutions have policies defining what requirements of AI provide are acceptable in what context. The surest way to approach these systems is to research, organize, and proofread with their aid, while continuing to do the actual thinking and writing yourself. That way is also just better for you in the long term, as writing papers is one of the main ways that you learn to think clearly about a subject.
In this sense, they eliminate much of the rote, time-consuming aspects of writing a research paper so that the majority of your time can be focused on what is really important: discovering your position and substantiating it.
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