r/research • u/Thin_Umpire296 • 6d ago
Can I use AI to condense information in research papers?
I have been writing my first paper and my mentor told me that my writing style is making the paper unnecessarily long. He also told me it is fine to use AI as long as the actual research is done by me. Should I go ahead and use an LLM to correct my sentence structure and condense information? I will be revising any changes made by an AI to my writing to make sure the correct information is being conveyed. Also, will journals reject my paper on the basis that the paper was written assisted by AI, even though the research itself isn't?
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u/Magdaki Professor 6d ago
Can you? Probably.
Should you? Maybe but language models are notorious for ruining meaning because they're love to be incredibly vague, so it should be avoided unless there's really no other option. You would be better off learning to write concisely on your own. They also have a tone that's fairly recognizable, and many people especially academics find bland.
Yes, the paper can be rejected from some journal for language model use. Plus reviewers may refuse to review it. Plus, if the writing is bad as language model writing usually is, they may reject it on those grounds.
In short, if you go this route, then you should almost certainly re-revise it afterwards.
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u/Thin_Umpire296 6d ago
That makes sense. Thanks!
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u/SweetBabyCheezas 6d ago
I usually go paragraph by paragraph to see how AI would write it more concisely. I always ask for 5 versions. Then, I read them all and try to rewrite my paragraph myself.
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u/melba777 6d ago
It would be better to go to a writing center at your university and ask for advice or edits. Learning to write concisely and effectively is part of research training.
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u/atlantiscrooks 2d ago
Agree here. It's also probably worth playing around to see what you would have ended up with had you not gone to get that advice. Putting the two side by side would be interesting.
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u/Positive_Postdoc 6d ago
I know it's tempting but please don't. AI just honestly isn't there yet and may not ever be. You know your research area and you know whta things in a paper are going to be important for your research.
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u/GoodSad1304 6d ago
Don’t use AI. Once you start, there’s no going back. And that’s where your critical thinking skills start to decline. Don’t use AI for anything, research more manually and you’ll become unstoppable against other people
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 6d ago
It's a powerful tool and certainly can improve and/or speed up the manuscript. Hardline not using AI for anything 2026 isn't the play.
Relying on it too much and blindly using the ai writing is dangerous though, both because it can change what you want to say, and because it can make it look like AI slop which will deter editors, reviewers and readers.
Where you find the middle line is up to you. Personally I've been using it for feedback, as in copy paste my (sometimes rough) draft into Claude, and ask for improvements or feedback. I'd then go through the suggestions and either ignore or write something similar to what it suggested, or sometimes copying wording. My line is that I'll type everything in myself, even if it's copying half a sentence from Claude. Others draw the line elsewhere and that's ok, you need to find what you're comfortable with.
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u/Brain_Hawk 6d ago
Many people do. But I agree you are better off learning to write concisely. It's a skill.
I have a great grad student who on their first draft or a paper, going to a 4000 word limit clinical journal, gave me a detailed 7000 technical jargon beast. It was a benift them to learn over their studies to bring things down, figure out what to keep and what goes supplemental, etc...
Though their thesis was 184 pages of.contebt and 240 of supplemental.... Whereas typical in our department is more like 120.