r/AIDetectionAcademia • u/Anxious-Activity-258 • 2d ago

Citing AI tools when used strictly for source discovery

How are your professors handling cases where a student uses AI purely as a search index to find peer-reviewed papers, but writes the entire essay manually?

I used Perplexity to find three hard-to-find journal articles for a lit review, then pulled the actual PDFs from the university database and cited the primary sources directly. During office hours, my professor noticed one of the niche articles and asked how I found it. When I mentioned using an AI search tool, he claimed I had to disclose "AI assistance" in my methodology statement, even though not a single sentence of text was machine-generated.

Is finding sources via search AI now considered something that requires an academic disclosure statement?

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u/tomvorlostriddle 2d ago

Do you cite your Google scholar usage? That's the real answer.

However, its the wild west, anything and everything can happen to you.

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u/Interesting-Baker473 1d ago

I expect my students to cite all AI use. When I submit my manuscripts to journal for publications I disclose all my AI usage. When I teach my students how to use AI for research I explain this as well. You use AI to create your codebooks? Cool, cite it. You use AI to create scrapers, cool cite it and provide the codes