Research Assistance Prompts: Literature Review, Citations

AI can shave days off a literature review — and it can also invent five entirely fictional sources that look exactly like real journal articles. The skill is using it for the parts where it is excellent (organising, comparing, synthesising) and never for the part where it is dangerous (inventing citations). This tutorial draws that line clearly.

1. Introduction

Anyone who has written a dissertation knows the slow torture of literature review week — twenty open tabs, four citation managers, and a growing suspicion that you are missing the one paper everyone else cites. AI can collapse a lot of that into a few hours of structured work. But it has a notorious weakness: when asked for sources, it sometimes invents plausible-looking citations that do not exist. Real-sounding authors, real-sounding journals, plausible page numbers — but the paper is fictional. Students have been failed, lawyers have been sanctioned, and academic careers have been damaged by this exact failure mode.

The fix is not to avoid AI for research. It is to use it for the tasks where hallucination is harmless (synthesising sources you provide) and never for the tasks where hallucination is catastrophic (inventing the sources themselves).

2. The Concept Explained

Think of a literature review as a funnel. At the top you have a broad topic. You narrow it down through search terms into a longlist of papers. You read those and reduce them to a shortlist. You then synthesise the shortlist into themes, identify the gap your work fills, and write the chapter. AI is genuinely useful at three of these five stages — and genuinely dangerous at one.

The clearest rule of thumb: you find the sources, AI helps you work with them. Use a real academic database — Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, JSTOR, your university library — to locate the papers themselves. Then use AI to help you read, compare, synthesise, and format.

3. The Problem Without This Discipline

Give me 10 academic sources on the
effects of microplastics on marine life,
in APA format.

4. The Solution

--- PROMPT 1: search-term brainstorm ---
Act as a research librarian. I am researching
"the effect of microplastics on marine
zooplankton populations" for a Master's
dissertation.

Give me 8 search-term combinations I should
use in Google Scholar. Include synonyms,
adjacent fields, and Boolean operator syntax.
Do NOT give me any specific paper titles or
authors.

--- PROMPT 2: synthesise papers I provide ---
I have read the following 5 papers (full
references and abstracts pasted below). Act
as a literature-review assistant.

1. Cluster them into themes.
2. For each theme, list which papers support
   which finding.
3. Note where papers disagree.
4. Identify the gap in the literature — what
   has nobody studied yet that would naturally
   come next.

Papers:
"""
… paste 5 full references + abstracts here …
"""

--- PROMPT 3: format a citation I already have ---
Format this reference in APA 7th edition:

Author(s): Sarah Chen and Maria Lopez
Title: Microplastic ingestion in copepods
Journal: Marine Pollution Bulletin
Year: 2023, Volume 184, pages 114210
DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.114210

5. Step-by-Step: A Safe Research Workflow

1. Define your question precisely. Spend ten minutes writing the actual research question in one sentence. AI cannot help you here — clarity is your job.
2. Ask AI for search terms, not sources. Use Prompt 1 above. The output is a search strategy you take to Google Scholar or your library — not a list of references.
3. Find and download the real papers yourself. Read at least the abstract of each before adding it to your shortlist. This step is non-negotiable.
4. Ask AI to synthesise. Paste full references and abstracts (or full papers, if your tool allows). Use Prompt 2 to cluster themes, find agreements and disagreements, and spot gaps.
5. Verify every claim before writing. When AI says "Chen and Lopez found that…", open Chen and Lopez and confirm the exact wording. Paraphrase drift is a real risk.
6. Use AI for formatting only. Reference formatting is exactly the kind of mechanical task AI is excellent at — provided you supply the bibliographic data.
7. Run a fabrication check. Before submission, paste your reference list into AI: "For each of these references, what should I personally verify before citing? Flag any that look unusual." Then verify the flagged ones.

Tip: The simplest test for whether you are using AI safely in research is this — could a strict supervisor or honour-code officer be in the room watching what you do, and you would have nothing to hide? If yes, you are doing it right.

6. Practice Exercises

7. Key Takeaways