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The Effortless Academic

Here is How AI Wrote my Discussion Section

Published 2 months ago • 1 min read

Sponsor: Anara

Anara uses AI to help researchers quickly understand dense materials, whether academic papers, books, or lecture recordings, while keeping everything organized and traceable.​
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Writing Your Discussion With ChatGPT Deep Research

Dear Scholar,

I am just finishing the final edits for a paper we are about to submit. I took the opportunity to experiment with writing as much of it as possible using AI and my notes. Surprisingly, the discussion section was the part best suited for AI. I will share my exact workflow with you further below.

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The question on your mind might be: Did it actually work?
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The answer is no, not straight away. AI doesn't produce good results out of the box. However, we can significantly enhance the results by providing a few of our notes as guidance and by extending ChatGPT's context with Deep Research, which conducts an extensive internet search for approximately 10 minutes. The notes I used were a by-product of the so-called result notes I take to document my academic project. Check out the AKM 2.0 webinar to learn all about it.

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The output then still needs to be refined into good academic writing with a few additional prompts but the result is roughly 75% complete (not counting the factual adjustments you will inevitably make).

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I have included all prompts for you to try in this week's article. Here is the outline of the process:

The best way to understand this workflow is by considering the context. ChatGPT can answer any question if you provide it with the necessary information (i.e. the context), to respond. However, when writing a paper, this information is often not immediately available. Therefore, the context must be expanded. ChatGPT can easily do this by searching the internet! The open-access papers it finds become part of this context, and the correct prompts guide it to generate the information in academic prose.

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Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

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Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

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PS: I have been quiet the last few weeks due to a paper deadline and a little bit of family time. We should get back on schedule now!

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