If you do choose to use a Generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT, to help you with your research and understanding of your university work, we suggest that you use it only to gather basic and background information about a topic you are learning about or interested in using in your academic assignments or individual research.
You can use AI chatbots to summarise a topic area and recommend some further reading. In this respect, the tools can provide information on the same kind of footing as Wikipedia and other general web-based reference sources. You should therefore treat the information given to you by AI tools in the same way: it is not original, detailed or authoritative enough to be cited in your academic work, but you can use the information to investigate the further reading it recommends. You could also potentially ask it to recommend key words and phrases that you can then use to look for more scholarly and appropriate information sources in Library Search or databases.
You should always keep in mind that AI does not ‘know’ anything, and it cannot be relied upon to give you good quality, or sometimes even true, information.
If you use tools like Elicit and Consensus, they will provide links and citations for their recommendations. You can read these recommended articles and use them in your work. However, you should remember that the tools do not always distinguish between good quality articles and poor quality articles. Always read them and make this decision for yourself.
Last reviewed: 22 August 2025
