Most people think ChatGPT's hallucinations are bad: fake information that looks real.

But you can use ChatGPT's hallucinations intelligently to your advantage.

Here's how: What do I mean by using hallucinations intelligently?

Most people think hallucinations are bad because they use ChatGPT to generate content. And hallucinations are fake content.

But reframe hallucinations as unexpected connections that your brain was unable to make.

And hallucinations can become moments of spark for you.

Evidence Hunt is an AI-powered app that will help you gather and analyze medical evidence.

Think of it as PubMed+ChatGPT.

Ask it a question and it will give you an answer with references to published papers. Plus, it will give PICO analysis for every paper.

And it's free! Go to evidencehunt(dot)com and sign up for a free account.

Go to "Chat" and type in your question.

Evidence Hunt will answer your question and give you a list of papers it cites.

[If you want elaborate answers or want to use filters, Evidence Hunt has a monthly plan for €15.]

How to ask smart questions during presentations (even if you're unfamiliar with the topic): A couple days ago, I attended a presentation by a colleague. He is working on the relationship between writing and walking with a focus on vagabonds in European literature.

It was a fascinating and stimulating presentation.

While I was listening to my colleagues, a couple of questions came to my mind. But since this was a new topic for me, I wasn't sure if my questions were worth asking.

Elicit just had a major update. They've introduced AI-powered "Notebooks."

This will make the literature review process super efficient.

Here's how to use Notebooks in @elicitorg: Go to Elicit(dot)com and log in to your account.

You will see a message "Add notebook title."

Type in the title of your project.

Finding open access research papers is a huge challenge.

Takes a lot time and labor. And you're not sure if a paper was published in a predatory journal.

Here's a free browser extension to help you find realible open access articles — in seconds: Go to leanlibrary(dot)com and click on the "Add to Chrome" button in the top-right corner.

Add it to you Chrome and then click on the puzzle-like icon to pin it to your browser.

Lean Library will ask you to select your institution.

Select it if the name of your institution appears in the drop-down menu. If it doesn't, click on "Lean Library Open."

Adobe just launched an AI Assistant in Acrobat PDF Reader.
Costs $19.99/month.

But you can read PDFs with an AI Assistant for free.

With PDFGear 👇 Go to pdfgear(dot)com and click on the "Free Download" button.

Insteall PDFGear after it gets downloaded.

How to use Claude/ChatGPT smartly for academic writing:

[This process involves no plagiarism.]

Example prompts included 👇 You can use any free or paid version of ChatGPT or Claude for this. For the purposes of this post, I am using Claude 3 Opus.

Start by telling Claude/ChatGPT that you would like it act as your academic writing assistant.

Example prompt:

"I would like you to act as my academic writing assistant. You don't have to write for me. I will write myself but I'd need your help. Does that make sense?"

Claude/ChatGPT will say it will help you with brainstorming, structuring, proofreading, etc.

Staying up to date with the latest research is a big challenge.

arXiv hosts 2.4M+ latest research papers you can read for free.

arXiv articles are not peer reviewed. So you get access to latest research as it's happening.

Plus, arXiv has a free AI-powered reading assistant. Go to arxiv(dot)org. Type in keywords related to your research topic in the search bar in the top-right corner.

arXiv will give you a list of related articles.

Click on the article you want to read and arXiv will give you its abstract.

Google Scholar just introduced a PDF Reader and Adobe put an AI Assistant in Acrobat PDF Reader:

Go to Google Scholar and you will the news about the new PDF reader.

Click it and a blog post will open up. Scroll down click the link "Chrome web store page."

This will take you to Google Scholar PDF Reader extension. Add it to your browser.

Google Scholar has been flooded with research papers containing AI-generated text.

Look up phrases like "An an AI langauge model," "I don't have access to real-time data," "As of my last knowledge update"... and you will see hundreds of papers with text generated by ChatGPT.

These papers have been published not just by predatory journals.

Even journals by established academic publishers like Elsevier are publishing papers with AI-generated content.

Clearly, academics are using ChatGPT to generate content for their papers.

But this is not the whole story...


Certainly (😉), it is true that there are some articles that contain text generated by ChatGPT. Example below:

Researchers are using ChatGPT to generate content for their papers...and are getting caught.

Want to avoid this kind of embarrassement?

Use Consensus, it has an AI-powered Copilot integrated with academic databses.

Ask it to generate an outline for a literature review.

It will give you an outline with citations to published research.

No nonsense like "As an AI language model..." Here's a detailed write-up on Consensus:

Consensus is an AI-powered search engine that will supercharge your literature review. Usually when we have to collect papers for our literature review, we use Google Scholar or PubMed.

Now, the limitation of Google Scholar and PubMed is that they use lexical search, which is an older model of searching literature.

They match words in your question with words in their databases, which means that they do not understand the meaning of your question.

If you ask Google Scholar a question, something like what happened in India in 1857, it will not answer your question.

It will only give you books and papers relevant to your question because it doesn't really understand the meaning of your question. It can only match words.

Similar is the case with PubMed. If you ask a question, for example, how do older people self-manage lower back pain? It will not answer your question. It will give you sources, and you will have to read them to find an answer for yourself.

But if you ask consensus, it will understand your question. And that's because it is ai-powered and it uses a different model of search, which is called semantic search.

If I ask consensus a question like what happened in India in 1857, then census will give me a list of relevant sources. And if I click on the Copilot button, it will generate an answer for me.

As you can see in the video above, it gives me a detailed answer to my question, and Consensus has also cited relevant sources in its answer.

Now, the Copilot in Consensus is a really powerful tool. Think of it as having ChatGPT inside your Consensus. So, for example, I can ask the copilot to help me prepare an outline for my literature review.

As you can in the video above, the Copilot has generated a detailed outline that I can use as a starting point for my literature review.

Consensus also has this really great feature called Consensus Meter.

So, if you ask a Yes/No question, for example, does immigration improve economy? and click on Synthesize, Consensus will give you a summary of the top ten relevant papers. And it will also give you the consensus of the academic community.

So, in this case, out of the seven papers analyzed, 86% of the papers argue that immigration does improve economy.

This feature can be very useful if you're doing an exhaustive literature review and want your review to be as comprehensive as possible. Unlike Google Scholar and PubMed, Consensus also gives you a one-line summary of every article it suggests.

If you find a paper useful, you can always bookmark it and save it to your list.

When Consensus gives you a particular paper, it also tells you the kind of study it is: if it's a systematic review, if it's a randomized controlled trial, if it's a meta analysis and so on.

Consensus also gives you Study Snapshots, which includes population, sample size, methods, and outcomes.

If you use Google Scholar or PubMed, you will have to read through papers to find out these details.

Consensus also tells you if a paper is highly cited or if it has been published in a rigorous journal. These features will save you a lot of time and they are not available in Google Scholar or PubMed.

Another great feature consensus has is the filters. Let's say, I have this question “How do older people self-manage lower back pain?” And I want to look at papers published since 2010 and I want to look at only systematic reviews.

So, all I have to do is select the relevant filters and click apply and consensus will give me systematic reviews on this topic published since 2010.

Another awesome feature of Consensus that's my personal favorite is that you can export papers from Consensus to Zotero.

Right click anywhere on the screen, scroll down and click on Zotero Connector, then Save to Zotero and then Save to Zotero DOI.

Select your relevant Zotero collection and click on Done. Zotero will open an Item Selector for you. Select the papers you want to export and click OK.

Now, if you go to your Zotero, you will see the papers in the relevant collection.

Consensus also has a custom GPT. With more than 3 million conversations, this is the most popular GPT in the GPT Store.

To use it, open your ChatGPT and then click on Explore GPTs. Go to Research and you will see Consensus as the number one GPT.

Click on it and then Start Chat. If you ask Consensus GPT a question, it will reply with reference to published papers.

If you found this post helpful, share it with your friends and follow me for more tutorials on how to use your apps for academic purposes.

Academic journals are publishing peer reviewed papers with content generated by ChatGPT 🤦

This is embarrassing.

Here's how you can use ChatGPT smartly to avoid this kind of embarrassment 👇

Open your ChatGPT and click on your profile photo in the bottom-left corner.

Select "Customize ChatGPT." You will see two boxes for custom instructions.

In the first box, tell ChatGPT a bit about yourself. For example:

I am an academic researcher with a PhD in [your field].

For the second box, use the following instruction:

You will respond like my research assistant.
You will never mention that you are an AI model. I already know that. Repeating it is a waste of time and resources.
If I ask you a question, you will never use any meta remarks in your answers. For example, if I ask you proofread a paragraph, you will not say anything like "Here is the proofread version of your paragraph." You will simply give me the proofread version.
You will keep your answers precise and will not use more words than necessary.
You will decline all requests asking for citations and references to academic articles or any other sources.
You will follow these instructions strictly and will never deviate from them.

With Microsoft Copilot Pro, you can now create custom Copilot GPTs.

You can share custom Copilots with your students and colleagues. And they can use your custom Copilots without any subscription.

Here's how to create a custom Copilot to serve as your writing assistant: Open Microsoft Bing and select Copilot.

Click on "See all Copilot GPTs" and select "Create a New Copilot GPT."

In the Copilot GPT Settings, you will two tabs: Create and Configure.

Skip Create and click on Configure.

ChatGPT has over 3 million custom GPTs.

Here are 3 custom GPTs designed for academic researchers.

They answer your questions with clickable links to published articles.

No fake citations or hallucinations. 1. Consensus

With more than 3 millions conversations, Consensus is the top-ranked GPT for academic research.

Look for Consensus in the GPT store and start asking questions.

Cites papers and also gives you their short summaries.

Anthropic claims Claude 3 is better than GPT-4.

Claude 3 is better at undergraduate level knowledge, graduate level reasoning, and reasoning over text.

As an academic, I wanted to see if Claude 3 is a better peer reviewer of research articles than GPT-4.

Comparison 👇 I start by giving both Claude 3 and GTP-4 an article by Franco Moretti, "Conjectures on World Literature" published in 200.

Moretti is a famous scholar of world literature and the novel.

I upload Moretti's paper and ask Claude 3 and GPT-4 to go through it and keep its content in mind. I tell both of them that they don't have to anything else.

Claude's response is shorter (one paragraph) whereas GPT-4 gives me five paragraphs.

More importantly, Claude 3 gets to the point quickly. It understand the central idea of the paper better and words it both precisely and concisely.

GPT-4 understands the text, but it rambles a lot and takes longer to get to the point. This makes its response unnecessarily words.

Numerous AI lets you use ChatGPT inside Excel and Google Sheets.

Here's how:

Go to and click on "Get Started" to activate your free trial. numerous.ai
You can use it in both Google Sheets and MS Excel.

Dimensions is an AI-powered tool designed to make your literature review faster and easier.

It gives you AI-generated summaries of research papers — even those that are paywalled.

It also lets you create graphs of citation networks.

You can use Dimensions for free! Go to dimensions(dot)ai and click on "Login" in the top-right corner.

Register for free and then log in to your account.

Before you start using Dimensions, you'll need to familiarize yourself with its interface.

Research Kick is an AI-powered app that helps you:

craft compelling research questions and

find reseach gaps

— in minutes.

Try it out at researchkick(dot)com Go to researchkick(dot)com and click on "Get started."

Create an accoun and upgrade to a paid plan.

Once you've upgraded, you will be take to Research Kick's main user interface.

JSTOR just launched an AI-powered reading assistant for research papers.

Here's how to use it: Log in to your JSTOR account and type in a few keywords.

JSTOR will tell you they're working on a new kind of search. Click on "Try it with your search."

You will see a list of papers. Click on anyone and you will see an AI-powered reading assistant to the right of your screen.

JotBot is an AI-powered note-taking assistant that will supercharge your writing.

It'll help you beat the writer's block, brainstorm ideas, take audio notes, and summarize videos lectures.

Here's how to use it: Go to myjotbot(dot)com and click on "Start writing" to create an account.

Starting a new research project is always challenging.

Here's a Research Kick+Elicit workflow to help you with it.

It'll help you:
• Craft an interesting research question
• Collect relevant papers for literature review
In a fraction of time.

You can learn it in 10 min: 1. Go to researchkick(dot)com and click on "Get started."

Create an accoun and upgrade to a paid plan.

Once you've upgraded, you will be take to Research Kick's main user interface.

(Research Kick costs $9/month and $99/year.)