Welcome to the Library’s guide to using Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) to support your literature searching. This resource aims to help you understand the benefits and limitations of using generative AI for finding literature to reference in your academic work.
Before you use any AI tool to support your assessed work, please check the guidance from your module or course and read the University’s guidance for students on using artificial intelligence in your learning.
Generative AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot can be helpful when you need to identify a topic to research and/or define a research question.
Perhaps you have an area of interest you’d like to research but need to refine into a research question or statement. Or maybe you want to get to know a little more about a topic, to give you ideas for themes or topics to research more deeply in the published literature.
You can generate prompts which will direct the Gen AI tool to help you with these tasks.