AI Tools to Assist in Writing Scientific Papers?

The advances in the field of so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular the development of platforms like ChatGPT, have sparked countless discussions in the scientific world, raising great hopes or fears depending on one's perspective.

Many students saw the opportunity to use AI to support them in creating term papers or larger scientific works, or even toyed with the idea of having their work created entirely by AI. University officials feared for the scientific qualification of students in light of these new possibilities, while professional ghostwriters and authors suddenly saw their field of business threatened as a technical tool threatened to take over their work.

To Write Yourself or Not – That Is Not the Question

In the meantime, the initial excitement about ChatGPT & Co has subsided, as the exaggerated expectations have not been consistently fulfilled and their limitations have become clear. Today, it is clear that such tools cannot be used to create complete papers that meet high scientific standards due to their technical and logical limitations. The reasons for the limited usability of ChatGPT & Co have been sufficiently analyzed and described by writing professionals. Especially in the field of scientific writing, understanding the respective context is essential. Otherwise, there is a risk of reproducing the same thing over and over again.

Support: Yes, Please

However, this does not mean that AI will have no practical significance for scientific work today and in the future. On the contrary: the hype surrounding the ethically and legally charged question of whether scientific papers can and should be created by software has obscured rather than enabled the view of what is essential: namely, that AI tools can take over important supporting functions for scientific work, which have been further differentiated and deepened in recent years. For example, such applications are now able to structure topics and issues, analyze data, find relevant sources for research papers, provide initial insights into subject areas, present existing texts in an overview, or structure and control one's own research process. Search engines such as Semantic Scholar or exchange platforms are just two of countless helpful AI-supported tools that, when used correctly, can be of great help and relief for scientific work.

We ask – PDFs answer

A good example of the supporting function of specialized AI tools is FragDasPDF, which is also frequently used by ghostwriting professionals. It uses artificial intelligence to transform the increasingly widespread, but still very bulky and static PDF formats into interactive and dynamic sources of information. By enabling targeted searches for facts, relevant passages and data, it relieves the user from having to click through the often very extensive documents for hours as part of time-consuming research. In addition, it offers a summary function based on the entire document in all scientifically relevant languages, regardless of whether it is a scientific treatise, operating instructions or legal texts.