Tuesday, 21 March 2023

Your New Co-Researcher- Boon or Bane? Productivity Enabler or Creative Loss? -Message to Researchers, Faculty, and Students!

Dear Researcher, Faculty and Student Friends

Three Years back, a few students who are applying to the US requested me to prepare a “Step by Step Approach to develop a Systematic Literature Survey (SLR) based Paper Publication”. In earlier days, it used to take at least 1 month to conduct a fundamental literature survey for a basic paper publication. On top of it, the author needs comprehension skills, English articulation skills, and of course domain understanding to write a paper. Hence paper publication skill is limited to a few people.

In this context, I made a step-by-step approach for developing SLR based article (you may refer - https://www.slideshare.net/RaviSaripalle/step-by-step-approach-to-systematic-literature-review-slr-journal-paper-first-time-authors-research-navigator). If you simply follow the steps mentioned in this presentation, you can write a paper in 10 days’ time!

However today my presentation becomes meaningless! Chatgpt 3 or 4 is coming in the form of a technical tsunami. It hardly takes 3 seconds to generate 10 different titles if you know the basic theme of your paper publication. It takes 10 seconds to generate 30 different publication references. It takes 10-15 seconds to finetune your introduction paragraph and another 30 minutes to clean and make it your way. If you have experimental results with you, it takes 3 days to write a decent paper!

Now, what is the question? Is it killing creativity and novelty? Or is it killing the natural language ability to write a paper? Or is it helping the researcher to focus more on research, curiosity and exploration, and experimentation? 

Let me answer this way.

In the 1980s, people used to physically visit various libraries and write a paper on physical paper. Often availability and accessibility of the physical papers/books, repetitively copying the same matter again and again on multiple A4 papers, and finally making a fair copy to submit, are certain limitations to those researchers. It is also a discouragement to the creativity and originality of the researchers. 

Later type machines came and partly solved the fair copy issue but still, accessibility and availability remained challenges. Later word processing and the internet solved these issues to a great extent but the ability to write English, articulation, etc are a few limitations. 

Grammarly/Jasper Type of tools came into existence to solve grammar issues, but still individual has to reach so many sites to gather literature. Still, limitations of the search capability, and articulation remained as bottlenecks.

In all these cases, researchers are still worried about other aspects than original experimentation and results analysis. Chatgpt 3 and Chatgpt 4 are solving these issues. Last week I was helping with one article. Hardly it took 10 minutes to complete all these mundane tasks and helped us to focus on core results and discussion sections, which are fundamental to the research. In this process, Chatgpt gave access to certain core articles which we would have missed in our traditional literature survey process.

Obviously, the chatgpt platform is a bane to a few traditional researchers. However, it is a boon for the new-age researcher. They should focus more on identifying the root problem, applying Design Thinking, and Developing relevant solutions. They need not focus on literature surveys and how to write a paper!

Dear Students, when the market is facing a recession, you should make your resume strong. Paper publications make your resume superior. If you are planning for higher education, paper publications are a must. Please start using Chatgpt and publish a few basic SLR-based papers.

Using ChatGPT for literature surveys and scientific research is legal. However, Springer Nature clarified that ChatGPT can't be credited as an author on a research paper. Ultimately, research must have transparency in methods, and integrity and truth from authors. You also need to see the aspects of the model's unreliability in terms of providing accurate or authentic references and citations. Please read this article before you start making your next research article- https://www.animateyour.science/post/how-to-use-chat-gpt-opportunities-and-risks-for-researchers

Life and Time never remain constant! Physical Paper-Type Writer & Shorthand – Word Processor & Internet – Productivity Tools like Grammar Editors, Jasper AI Copywriter/AI Content Generator – Chatgpt-3 – Chatgpt 4 (analyze image-related queries as well)- Next what?? Stay tuned!

So, are you ready to publish your next scientific SLR-based article?

Ravi Saripalle

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