As GenAI becomes increasingly integrated into research landscapes, it is essential to examine its impact and consider how it can be leveraged responsibly and ethically.

Gen AI tools can be used at almost every stage of the research life cycle. But doing so has implications that are not immediately obvious.

This guide looks at how to use Gen AI tools responsibly and ethically. It includes information:

• to help develop knowledgeable and thoughtful approaches to its use.
• to support critical thinking on Gen AI use
• on policies around its use

An ever-increasing array of tools offer different, and sometimes specialised types of research assistance. Some offer research communication assistance: writing, editing, and translating across languages. Others offer more substantive (and problematic) interventions into research discovery processes: such as data generation and design; literature searches, sorting, and reviews. In effect, GenAI assistance can be involved at almost every stage of the research life cycle.    

Like any research assistance tool, it is vital to develop knowledgeable and thoughtful approaches to its use. To understand what different tools can offer; how each collects, sorts, validates and packages knowledge and communication; as well as the implications of their use on the integrity, diversity, strength and sustainability of our knowledge-making practices.

This Guide provides resources to support informed, critical, and effective uses of GenAI for Research Assistance; not for research creation or authorship. GenAI should never be doing the research work for you.

This is not a 'how to' guide that provides instruction on using GenAI tools.

     This content is licensed to Victoria University under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.