When has yours absolutly been one of those times, your mind feels like the entire internet with multiple hyper links? Your going for something with your pen, trying to hit the world with some new and unlike what has been done before idea. You begin with a massive exciting and terrifying thought like “the future of urban mobility” or “quantum computing at home”. You have no idea where to start. If you’re anything like me in these circumstances, it usually involves sifting through all the search results, reading abstracts from countless bowls before you have a single clue of what to do or where to find anything that might lead to a nugget of information that everyone else has missed. But,”it’s happening”. Now there’s a huge shift in the way to research: instead of trying to figure everything out on-line, you have a personal research assistance that never sleeps, never complains and can connect the dots you didn’t even know were there. Our goal is to identify specific web papers rather than trying to identify the larger topic area. The focus is on creating a unique article; therefore, locating documents will enable you to develop an article using the same material when writing your unique piece.
The Overwhelm of the Digital Library
Let’s keep it real; the single biggest benefit of the internet – being able to find virtually anything – is also one of the biggest challenges a writer has to face. Enter any word or phrase into an academic library, or an everyday search engine, there will be overwhelming numbers of results. Academic papers, blogs, newspapers, articles, pre-prints… the data is endless. For a writer, the monumental task of sorting through that gigantic volume of materials in order to find scholarly papers is just pure torture. You’ll click, scroll down, attempt to figure out what the title of 1000s of downloaded PDFs are and only read the first two pages before saying to yourself “screw this.” This point is the point where writers’ great ideas die; becoming entirely buried under the abundance of data. You aren’t looking for a needle in a haystack you are looking for the exact, shaped needle in an enormous mountain of haystacks. A broad topic will still always be considered just that; broad, too big, & way too abstract to get a handle on. The journey from your spark to your finished curation of suggested readings is a long and winding road that is strewn with interruptions. For an editor under deadline, this initial phase often takes longer than the actual writing, so there is little time or energy left to synthesise creations and create an interesting piece of content.
AI as the Intuitive Research Catalyst
The new tools provide completely new ways to search. Rather than doing a traditional keyword search by typing “sustainable architecture,” you can engage in a conversation with your AI assistant by saying, “I’m specifically interested in how biophilic design impacts our psychology in the context of post-pandemic office spaces, but I want research that has been published since 2021; and I want studies that disagree with the mainstream perspective on the subject.” The classic keyword-type search is replaced with an interactive search as the AI assistant begins its role as translator. The AI understands your complicated, nuanced interest and connects that into the latent organization of academic content in ways that capture how specific, contextualized interests also express a desire for contrarian evidence. Instead of simply locating studies on the web, it finds the right studies; locating seminal works, tracking back through citation pathways to locate newer or revisionist critiques, and identifying obscure pre-prints prior to becoming widely disseminated. As humans transition from being frantic searchers to strategic directors of the mission; defining mission parameters; identifying and filling gaps; as well as addressing unanswered questions. The AI will assist humans as they identify potential sources of identifying treasures by combing through the terrain—terrifyingly quickly and with stellar memory capabilities. For this reason, AI can be seen like a person that has a detailed map indicating potential locations of where a treasure may be found versus a person that starts with no solid information as to where they may dig for treasure.
From Keywords to Conceptual Clusters
The shift away from traditional keyword matching to concept/relation based searches is truly transformative. Traditional search engines simply look for the words present in titles and abstracts, whereas A.I. based search applications leverage the way humans think about topics based on their understanding of the concept and how related concepts are to each other. For instance, if you were researching the ethics of generative Artificial Intelligence in journalism, with a traditional search you might be able to find papers that contain those words; however, with an A.I. based exploratory search you would be able to find a cluster of papers on the broader category of trust in the media; algorithmic bias; copyright issues in a digital world; etc. These papers may not have all contained your original topic phrase but provide a web of knowledge. This search could also provide you with a paper from a legal studies database about the issue of precedent in automation, which you may not have thought to search for. This ability to create conceptual clusters is game changing because it not only answers your questions but helps to guide you to re-evaluate your question. An example could include beginning with the term ‘ethics,’ only to find that the greater debate is one of auditability. While you continue to refine your focus on the topic of your article, the emerging academic landscape will permit you to do so in real-time as data and research become progressively more available. Since this approach utilises academic networking and research synthesis, your final paper will not simply regurgitate the first three Google search results; instead, it will be built upon the reciprocal relationships between numerous academic databases.
Curating the Unseen and the Upcoming
The biggest benefit to a website editor who wants unique content is utilizing cutting-edge resources. In academic publishing, there is a host of time-lags for studies going through peer review and getting published, meaning by the time an idea is available via an academic publication, it has likely been out there for months or even years circulating amongst the intended communities. AI tools are extraordinarily effective at searching pre-print repositories such as arXiv, SSRN or bioRxiv, and conference proceedings. These repositories are where the newest, most crude, and most revolutionary ideas can be found when first introduced in web paper format. An AI (which can be registered under your profile) can continuously monitor these locations for you, and will provide you with notification of for any new uploads that conform to your desired subject matter. You will then have the ability to write (web paper) articles describing new trends before they become mainstream content. In addition, if you reference web papers that were previously uploaded within the past few weeks, your articles will have an ongoing unique or fresh quality that few can reproduce. AI is helpful at identifying “Sleeping Beauties,” web papers that existed some time ago with low attention before receiving attention again due to emerging relevant world events and new technology. When paired together, high-quality content can be made more available to you than when both types of content are used separately, allowing for the development of an outstanding piece of innovative digital content in an otherwise crowded digital space.
The Human-AI Synthesis: Where the Article is Born
Once you find the perfect collection of online research papers, creating a powerful story out of the revelations from those papers is equally important. In this case, AI provides more than just a search tool; instead, AI will partner with you through creative brainstorming. After you’ve collected all your crucial web research papers, you can ask the AI to summarize their different views on various topics, identify the three most surprising facts uncovered by each source, and create an outline for your article that effectively incorporates the views of the various sources you used. In addition, AI can help pinpoint the main tension or conflict identified in the ten web sources you reviewed. For example, after completing an analysis of 10 online articles discussing possible futures of work, the analysis may reveal that 7 of the articles cited ‘skill adaptation’ as a way to re-skill working adults, while the 3 remaining articles cited ‘universal basic income’ as an alternative solution and provide you with a suggested title: ‘Skill Adaptation vs. Basic Income: Two Competing Views on the Future of Work.’ The collaborative synthesis of your web research will be essential to your success. AI does an excellent job at processing raw data through brute force, identifying patterns, and organizing that data into usable formats. The human editor brings additional capabilities such as curiosity about the material being written about, developing an interesting narrative, questioning the quality of the sources of information, and then writing in a voice that relates to the reader. The final article is the result of the combination of these two interactions and represents a unique point of view based on a thoroughly researched, AI-assisted body of web articles.
When you find yourself with a large area of interest in your editorial office that you cannot write about alone, treat it as a terrain waiting to be learned with an exciting new suite of tools. Your turn from a big thought that is really just a thought to an original piece ready for publication has now turned into a trip of exploration with your own guide. You supply your own vision for the piece along with all your questions and your writing voice while AI does all of the cumbersome legwork to get you the shortest distance between where to start researching via the scholarly universe and where to get the most relevant and smallest amount of surprises so as the connecting dots between the 10 closest web papers you found earlier and if they are still valid by this time and still linkable; as well as provide you with the connections between these papers, thereby giving you content created both by reputable research sources (you now have) but also having created entirely new and engaging content, therefore, eliminating the fear of the next blank page when you attempt to fill it up for your readers because you now possess (or are getting) all the needed information (on a map) to help you create something no one else has ever seen.
