Train A.I on your research topic to learn faster

Learning new topics can be a daunting task, especially for academics who are constantly delving into new research areas. It can be time-consuming to read through multiple papers, only to find that they don't provide the answers you're looking for. However, there is a way to streamline this process and learn more efficiently: using chat GPT.

By copying and pasting a few published papers related to your research topic into chat GPT and asking it to summarize the papers at an undergraduate level, you can give the A.I a foundational understanding of the topic you're researching. From there, you can start asking specific questions and receive answers that are likely to be relevant to your research and are less likely to be wrong, as they rely more heavily on the publications you've provided. After you feed it more than 3 papers it becomes quite proficient in the field and you can use this session to ask it more specific questions. It’s like having a friend who’s a Ph.D. student in the field and has enough patience for your perpetual ignorance.

after feeding it a couple of papers it's capable of answering all these little questions you struggle with when reading in a new field.

For me it's most helpful as a companion for reading scientific papers. Instead of googling the terms I don't understand I would just ask chat GPT and get answers that are contextual to the papers I'm reading. This might sound like a lot of effort for reading papers, but it's actually drastically reducing the friction of researching a new topic. Another way of using it would be to streamline the process of dissecting fresh publications in your own field. just paste the abstract and the results sections and ask chat GPT to summarize it all into two sentences. It's great at distilling giant chunks of information.

Pro Tips: The key to using chat GPT efficiently is not worrying about formatting the papers when copying and pasting them. Just mark everything and drag it in. If the program tells you that your text is too long, simply click the edit button and cut some of the bottom text with ctrl + x. Paste the remaining text in the following prompt and mention that it's additional paragraphs of the same publication.

I also recommend keeping different subjects in different chat sessions, so that you can always come back and continue where you left off.

Keep each topic in a separate chat so you can always come back and continue where you left off.

Give it a try and see how it can enhance your learning experience! And if you have more tips on the best ways to use A.I in academia, please share them in the comments below!