ChatGPT has only been around for over half a year and has already changed many industries. The academic community was particularly affected by the introduction of the tool, with educators, students, and journalists discussing the implications of using ChatGPT.
But even though there may be some ethical questions you should consider before using the tool, it’s worth trying. Hence, here’s how to use ChatGPT to summarize a research paper.
What Can ChatGPT Do?
ChatGPT functions as a chatbot. It is a tool that uses natural language processing to understand user requests and generate texts based on them. You can generate any text – emails, essays, code, and even entire dissertations.
But besides generating texts, you can use ChatGPT to find information, summarize and rewrite texts, and more. This is why the tool is so popular among students. It can help you do your homework or research much faster and with less effort.
What Can You Summarize?
ChatGPT can generate all kinds of texts and summarize different types. Though it has its limitations, it is a fairly powerful tool that can summarize research papers, journal articles, books, and other academic texts for you.
By summarizing research papers, you can achieve several goals:
- You can determine whether the paper is relevant to your research by examining its summary and key points.
- You can recall the paper’s content if you read it a while ago and don’t want to read it again from start to finish.
- You can quickly get a summary of the paper that you can then rewrite and add to your own research paper in the literature review section.
Students and researchers usually use ChatGPT when summarizing research papers for the first two purposes. The third one gets tricky because the tool isn’t equipped to fully explain the value of a particular research paper in a summary that you could then add to your literature review.
If you want a research paper summary for the third purpose, you can do it yourself or seek professional assistance. By working with an experienced academic writer from the writing company Trust My Paper, you can create a well-written paper of your own without worrying about its quality.
Best Practices for Using ChatGPT
So, how can you use ChatGPT correctly? As mentioned earlier, the tool has its limitations. However, if you follow the best practices outlined below, you can achieve better results when using it. Just be prepared that it is not the same as a real human being and can only do so much for you.
1 Try Other Tools
Using ChatGPT alone is fine, but combining it with other tools can achieve even better results. Moreover, you might decide to only use other tools instead of for different types of tasks. Here are some apps and programs that could be useful to you:
- Write My Essays AI – This is an all-in-one tool for educational use. Students, researchers, and other people in academia love using it because it has several features in a single place. These include Title Generator, Essay Generator, Paraphrasing Tool, Conclusion Generator, Citation Generator, and Plagiarism Checker. With the help of these features, writing your research papers and essays will become much easier.
- ChatPDF – As the name suggests, this tool is similar to ChatGPT. Essentially, it is a tool designed specifically for working with PDF files. Students can easily drop textbooks, handouts, research papers, and other texts as PDFs into the tool and comprehend them faster. ChatPDF scans the text and answers any questions you have about it by finding relevant information in it rather than elsewhere.
- Grammarly and Hemingway Editor – If you decide to summarize the research paper yourself, you can use these two AI-powered tools for assistance. Grammarly is a popular proofreading tool that can help you detect and correct linguistic mistakes in your text. Hemingway Editor is another popular proofreading tool but with a different purpose. It will help you improve the readability and flow of your text by highlighting parts and elements that should be edited (including passive voice, adverbs, complex phrases, and hard-to-read sentences).
2 Find the Research Paper
When you are ready to use ChatGPT, you must find and get your research paper ready. It can also be an article, a book, or any academic or non-academic text you are interested in. Find it online and open it in a separate tab. If you have it as a document, you could open it in a separate tab depending on the file format.
3 Log In or Sign Up
Next, you must open ChatGPT in another tab and log into your account. You will need to sign up if you don’t have one yet. The tool’s free version doesn’t require you to pay for anything, so you will need the account to have a history of your interactions with the tool. It will be easy to go back and check what the tool told you in the past.
4 Type in Your Request
Now that you are all set up, you must type in your request for ChatGPT to process. Copy the link to the article or research paper you opened in a separate tab and type the request: “TLDR: [link to article].” If you want to summarize an entire book, you may not need to open it in a separate tab. Just ask the tool to “summarize [name of book].”
5 Be Careful with the Tool
Always be aware of the limitations of ChatGPT. After sending your request, it may give you an error message instead of a summary of your requested research paper. Moreover, it can even hallucinate and create a fake summary which could mislead you. It is also unaware of the events post-2021, so you won’t be able to ask it to summarize a book that was published after that year.6 Use Alternative Methods
Last, you can always use alternative methods for summarizing the paper. You can write the summary yourself or try copying and pasting the text of the paper into the tool. Both will take more time, but the results will be more accurate. Remember that ChatGPT is there for assistance – not to do the job for you entirely.
Wrapping Up
ChatGPT is a great tool for summarizing research papers, but you can also use it for various other tasks that will aid you academically. Use the tips in this article to help you get started with ChatGPT.
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