Research

Sources and Citations

What happens if you ask ChatGPT to generate a list of sources?

You'll likely get at least a few sources that are incorrect or completely fabricated (known as "hallucinations").

ChatGPT is not accessing the Internet or any other databases meaning that it won't be able to look up citations or cross-check the citations it provides. Because it is trained on a large language model, it can identify researchers, journals, and typical paper titles that may match your query. So, when it can't find a citation, it makes one up out of the pieces it can find. For more about checking citations, check out the FAQ linked below.

Need sources? We'd love to help! You can make an online or in-person appointment at uca.libcal.com/appointments.

Can ChatGPT summarize articles?

Not with the free version (GPT-3.5). You may be able to paste small chunks of an article into the chat and ask the AI for a summary, but you cannot provide a citation, URL, or document for GPT-3.5 to analyze.

If you subscribe to GPT-4, you can use OpenAI's native "Advanced Data Analysis" feature to summarize and possibly synthesize multiple articles. There may be other tools that are more useful for this type of task.