ChatGPT Features — Research
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When you go to a library to do research, the information you need is all around you, but the challenge is to narrow down, collate and reference the required information. Lucky for you, ChatGPT has memorized entire library and can do all the above required tasks within seconds. The challenge has morphed into creating the right prompt.
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While each research situation is unique, depending on who you are and what you are trying to do. Nevertheless, it never hurts to be on the same page as ChatGPT on who the audience of research is and what output do you have in mind. Begin by introducing yourself academically or whatever is the context of your research e.g. if you are a realtor researching house prices in a new place, or a zoologist researching animals in xyz city. Describe the level of research like whether you are attempting to come up with a research paper or trying to do a student assignment, or simply exploring a topic of personal interest or job assignment, or just researching places to eat around you. Research is an extremely vague term so best to narrow it down to you and your need. Then you can optionally assign a role to ChatGPT to help with your research. As an example, if you are an archeologist, you can assign it role of a historian to help you with your research.
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The next logical step is to come up with a rough outline of the final draft you are trying to generate. This is applicable both to generating a research paper or assignment or any other format like a book. This helps removing extra information and tell ChatGpt which aspects you want to cover like do you need a references section or not. Do you want output formatted in tables or texts. How long each section should be etc. You need to have this information available upfront for yourself, but you don’t need to pass it on to ChatGPT as the first step of research. It would just help you focus and limit the research you are trying to do.
Researching about anything usually involves brainstorming ideas and then collecting related information. You can use chatgpt to brainstorm research ideas or topic of study in the given field of research. You can begin by asking it to come up with top unanswered or under researched topic in the field. You can pick and choose and come up with list of topics you want more material on. Next step is gathering relevant information on selected topics. Again use the summary and output formatting tools discussed in earlier videos to make your study more meaningful. These include extracting summary from lengthy books or data tables. You have the option of discovering material related to your topic from books and organize them in tables or lists in paragraphs of your specified sizes. You can emphasize or de-emphasize topics of interest from otherwise broad discussions. You can even ask it to simplify the topic for you and ask follow-up questions about the topic to dissect it further. ChatGPT is even able to generate analysis and visualizations to help with your research. Given a dataset, it can even infer mean median modes and even advanced correlations in your dataset. Once you have basic statistics inferred, you can prompt ChatGPT for key insights and answer many questions about the dataset. The analysis gathering from raw or structured information is one of the most revolutionary capabilities of language models like ChatGPT and makes it a worthwhile partner in research. The best part is you probably don’t even need to give it a dataset to analyze. Most topics have datasets online. You can simply ask for statistics about various topics and be responded with excellent statistics right there and then.
You can followup your research by looking for relevant examples and studies. If you are doing a formal research, you can instruct it to give you examples which have proper references that can be added to your research paper. ChatGPT can also help you with citations for your work. Lastly, it can also help you with coming up with conclusion summary and proofreading your work.
You need to be beware of a few things when using ChatGPT for research. For one, the model was trained until 2021 so some information might not be real time or stale. Secondly, you need to beware of ChatGPT’s ability to hallucinate i.e. coming up with legit looking nonsense about a topic it has limited information on. It is a research tool but you need to be in the driving seat all the time. Be clear and specific that it needs to give you information with proper references to avoid publishing gibberish in your name.
For the sake of time, I focused on formal research only in this video, but the tools described should be able to help you in doing any kind of research with help of ChatGPT. Please let me know if you feel some aspect got left out or whether it really helped you. If you found the content helpful, please clap/share.
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