Artificial Intelligence-Facilitated Literature Review

Project Details

Funding Opportunity: Miller Faculty Grant

PI: Elena Cotos, Ph.D.

Co-PIs: Lily Compton, Ph.D., Sarah Huffman, Ph.D., & Kristin Terrill, Ph.D.

Submitted on December 11, 2023 to the Iowa State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT)

Status: Under Review

Abstract

This project addresses the pressing demand for instructing graduate students in effective, efficient, and ethical preparation of literature reviews using GenAI. Because guidance for how to aptly and judiciously utilize GenAI for research purposes is lacking, we aim to design an instructional module, AI-Facilitated Literature Review (AI-FLR), with materials and hands-on activities for generating summaries and critical comparisons of literature based on user-curated sets of publications and leveraging GenAI capabilities through Elicit, an add-on to citation management tools like Zotero. The module will offer detailed procedural instructions for using Elicit in the process of preparing an AI-FLR and provide fundamental principles for preparing an AI-FLR with research ethics and integrity. Project assessment will focus on instructional effectiveness and on pre/post learning outcomes resulting from pilot implementations in a Graduate Studies course and in a writing workshop provided by the Center for Communication Excellence (CCE). The outcomes will inform wider-scale implementations and the creation of additional GenAI-supported scholarly communication modules.