ChatGPT in Academic Writing

Recently ChatGPT causes a lot of discussions how and if it should be allowed
in academic writing. Especially for students this seems to be a shortcut to
get an assignment done with very little effort.

Let’s review what is the main purpose of an academic paper: “advance the
understanding of a particular topic or field, and to help drive further
research and innovation” (ChatGPT, 2023).

If your paper achieves this goal by using ChatGPT, then ChatGPT or Prompt Engineering is the research
method and should be mentioned and described as such in the “Research Method” section.
Unfortunately ChatGPT is not yet very helpful when it comes to producing new
insights in a field
but it can yield good results in a couple of low lever tasks, for example:

Finding an existing name of a concept you have in mind but cannot name.
Using this name you can then conduct further research.
Summarizing text in context of a research question
for a quick liturature review.
Grammar checking and sentence simplification.

If all this helps to achieve the goal of the paper faster or makes it
easier to understand, then this new technology should be welcomed with open
arms.

If a students asks ChatGPT to write a complete assignment by just providing a
topic, this assignment should fail in the review. If not, the review process
is flawed in the first place. It is not sufficient anymore to check the
punctuation and the citation format. Those times should have ended a long time ago.
At the moment, ChatGPT is not good at citing sources and makes up references if asked to do so.
Therefore, the validity of the references should be the first thing to check.