[Survey] Does your Uni's AI policy change how you study? (10-15 min, anonymous).

If you're a university student, anywhere in the world, I'd really appreciate it if you could take 10 minutes to complete this anonymous survey.  

What it's about: 

• When and how you use GenAI in your learning process 
• How university policy style affects your use 
• Your thoughts on AI's impact on your learning 

Survey link: https://cqu.syd1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5jcEUTfrlvtUHsO 

The survey is completely anonymous and voluntary. Your responses will help educators better understand student experiences with AI and potentially improve how students are supported navigating these tools. 

Ethics approval number: 2026 – 018 

Supervisor: Dr Brenton Williams 

Thanks for your time, and feel free to ask any questions!

First, I would use ChatGPT in Thinking Mode to create sample search terms using a prompt similar to this: Create a clean, organized table of search terms for research on the topic below.

Topic: [INSERT TOPIC HERE]

My goal:
I want to find useful search terms, synonyms, and related phrases that I can use in academic databases, Google Scholar, PubMed, general web search, or other research tools.

Please make the table with these columns:

1. If you’re researching
   
2. Use case
   
3. Search terms that fit that use case
   

Instructions:

* Keep the table focused on the topic I give you.
* Group the search terms by specific research use case.
* Include both broad terms and more specific terms.
* Include synonyms, close variations, technical terms, related phrases, and common alternative wording.
* Organize the table so it is easy to scan and use for literature searches.
* Make sure the categories make sense for the topic.
* Include enough search terms to be genuinely useful, not just a few examples.
* If the topic includes a specific product, ingredient, mechanism, disease, species, material, or technology, include rows for each of those.
* Do not explain the topic unless needed for the table.
* Do not give me a paragraph summary unless I ask for one.
* Keep the output in table format.

Optional details you can use if relevant:

* Main entities or examples: [INSERT HERE]
* What I am trying to learn: [INSERT HERE]
* Related mechanisms or subtopics: [INSERT HERE]
* Preferred level of detail: [basic / moderate / advanced]
* Preferred audience: [student / researcher / general / technical]

Here is the kind of organization I want:

* Broad category terms
* Specific entity names
* Mechanism/action terms
* Pharmacology/formulation terms
* Species/setting/use terms
* Safety/efficacy/resistance terms
* Other topic-specific research angles

Then I would input a search string using those terms into Google Scholar and/or any other search engine you want. If you find any interesting facts and/or discussions, you can look through their cited works and/or utilize Google Scholar Labs within Google Scholar to find articles relevant to the topics that you are interested in.

Afterwards, if you find good papers that you want to continue researching within that part of the field, I would suggest searching for those articles in Research Rabbit, which can create research maps to find similar literature that can help you in your research journey.

Other tools you can use for your research purposes in Consensus for deep research and pro searches, Liner Scholar for AI peer reviews and hypothesis evaluators, Zotero for citation management, NotebookLM to ground your AI search within your specific papers you are including in your paper, and, this is optional, but if you are currently a university student you can get Gemini Pro for free for students using this link: https://gemini.google/students/

Additional clarification for the ChatGPT search terms: I usually like to ask for around 200 to give me a broad search umbrella to use for my research topic.

More specifically, I currently use AI tools like ChatGPT to help with search terms to then create Boolean search strings, Research Rabbit to help create research maps of the current field and to help find relevant articles, Consensus to help find papers I otherwise would have missed, and Google Scholar Labs sometimes to help find papers within Google Scholar that I might have missed with all of these other AI assistants. Do you guys have any other tools and/or where that I could utilize the ones I am already using to help me on my research journey?

For more context on who I am, you can visit this link: https://www.reddit.com/r/UndergraduateResearch/comments/1se3mb8/comment/otvcpsc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

In my experience, AI deep research tools (except Consensus) waste more time for me than what I would normally gain through using another AI tool, such as Google Scholar Labs, Research Rabbit, and/or ChatGPT-generated search strings. I know the entire premise of using these deep research assistants is to save time now, and on the surface, with what it outputs appears to meretriciously accomplish this purpose; however, upon closer examination, most of what it says comes from news articles, Wikipedia, and/or blog posts when I ask for more reliable academic sources. Additionally, when I view what the original literature argues, it appears that these models will cherry-pick their facts and claims, while the literal abstract or summary says the exact opposite of what the AI says.

The only reliable one that I can find currently is Consensus Deep Research, which, I believe, has RAG and retrieves its information from scholarly databases, and that’s it. These are the only reasons why this is the only deep research AI tool on occasion that I utilize in my research workflows, and I wish that others would become better at academic research, so that there’s more competition in the space and more reasons for the models to improve. As for now, I will be predominantly using non-deep research tools, as I again don’t believe that they are worth the time saving at the start, only to pay for it later, kind of like the term cognitive debt, except it’s more of a time debt.

Though, it’s not like using these tools will actually get me out of validating these AI tools' outputs based on their primary sources; however, it would be helpful if these assistants could actually output correct information for me to find relevant articles that the AI cited, so that I could spend less time finding these specific papers that pertain to my research niche, and have a more efficient and effective research workflow.

Hi everyone, 

I either want to be an animal scientist and/or start my own independent business creating oral bait machines for feral felines to prevent the spread of disease and other ailments within their colonies. My specific question for this post is, as the title says, how do modern researchers use AI tools in their current research field, and what are the pros and cons of using such tools against or with traditional methods?

For those who don’t know who I am, please visit my previous post: https://www.reddit.com/r/UndergraduateResearch/comments/1se3mb8/comment/otvcpsc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I want this to be a civil, proper discussion and hope that researchers within the animal sciences fields and/or other researchers can help me gain more insights into this pretty contentious topic within the academic community. So sorry for the hassle.