LLMs are great tools for research. Here are a variety of ways you can use them:
Contents
(Click any of these links to go directly to that section)
Brainstorming research questions or hypotheses
For discussion of this, see Brainstorming.
Suggesting relevant literature or sources
If you’re looking for sources, you might try using Perplexity or Elicit or Consensus. They are each search engines, powered by LLMs that have been optimized for finding and presenting sources. Elicit and Consensus focus more on academic sources, while Perplexity includes academic and non-academic sources, but leans less academic. Here’s an example of Perplexity in action. You start by entering a query:
And then Perplexity presents you with a well-referenced answer:
Providing overviews of specific topics
This is another aspect of research that general-purpose LLMs struggle with. Here’s GPT-4’s response to a request for a detailed overview of some research:
Whereas, here is Perplexity’s response to the same prompt:
Generating summaries of articles / books
For discussion of this, see Summarization.
Drafting sections of research papers
For discussion of this, see Writing.
✉️ Send us your prompts! ✉️
If you have suggestions for additional uses of LLMs, we'd love you to send them to us (including an example prompt) at info@clearerthinking.org. If we like them, we may add them to our library and credit you where they appear.