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ChatGPT in Academic Writing

Recently ChatGPT causes a lot of discussions how and if it should be
allowed in academic writing. Especially for students this seems to be
a shortcut to get an assignment done with very little effort.

Let's review what is the main purpose of an academic paper: "advance
the understanding of a particular topic or field, and to help drive
further research and innovation" (ChatGPT, 2023).

If your paper achieves this goal by using ChatGPT, then ChatGPT or
Prompt Engineering is the research method and should be mentioned and
described as such in the "Research Method" section. Unfortunately
ChatGPT is not yet very helpful when it comes to producing new
insights in a field^1 but it can yield good results in a couple of
low lever tasks, for example:

  * Finding an existing name of a concept you have in mind but cannot
    name. Using this name you can then conduct further research.
  * Summarizing text in context of a research question^2 for a quick
    liturature review.
  * Grammar checking and sentence simplification.

If all this helps to achieve the goal of the paper faster or makes it
easier to understand, then this new technology should be welcomed
with open arms.

If a students asks ChatGPT to write a complete assignment by just
providing a topic, this assignment should fail in the review. If not,
the review process is flawed in the first place. It is not sufficient
anymore to check the punctuation and the citation format. Those times
should have ended a long time ago. At the moment, ChatGPT is not good
at citing sources and makes up references if asked to do so.
Therefore, the validity of the references should be the first thing
to check.

Bibliography

ChatGPT, .. (2023). Prompt: What is the main purpose of an academic
paper?. numbers ChatGPT Feb 13 Version

Endnotes

1) IMO, It does not yet qualify as a research method. In future,
Prompt engineering might be a powerful tool within the research
methods toolbox.
2) Summarizing something without a context of a research question
would imply the author of the original text included useless
information. As this is probably not his intend it does not makes
sense to simply summarize an article
(c) 2020-2021 Oliver Wolf
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