Gain practical insights into using AI to enhance your research, productivity, and career development.
AI is rapidly transforming the way research is conducted, from literature discovery and evidence synthesis to scientific writing, figure preparation, and peer review. This seminar provides a practical introduction to AI tools and workflows that early-career researchers can use in their daily work.
We will explore a range of literature review tools, including Consensus, Elicit, Connected Papers, ResearchRabbit, and NotebookLM, before demonstrating how AI Skills such as the Nature Skills Toolkit can support manuscript polishing, mock peer review, and publication-quality figure development.
The seminar concludes with a discussion on the future role of researchers in the AI era and the skills that will remain most valuable as AI becomes increasingly integrated into academic research.
What the session will cover:
1. Introduction: The Emerging AI Ecosystem for Research
2. AI Tools for Literature Review and Knowledge Discovery:
• Consensus: Quickly understand a research topic
• Connected Papers / ResearchRabbit: Map a research field and identify key papers
• Elicit: AI-assisted systematic review and evidence synthesis
• NotebookLM: Build and interact with your own literature database
3. AI Skills for Scientific Research: Nature Skills Toolkit
• Introduction to AI Skills and reusable workflows
• Demonstration using Codex
▫ Nature Polish – Improve academic writing, clarity, logic, and conciseness
▫ Nature Reviewer – Simulate peer review and identify weaknesses before submission
▫ Nature Figure – Critique and improve publication-quality figures
4. Discussion: What Matters Most in the AI Era? (5 min)
AI is evolving from a chatbot into a research ecosystem of tools, skills, and agents. The greatest opportunity for researchers is not simply working faster, but improving how we discover knowledge, communicate science, and exercise critical judgement.
Meet the speaker
Dr Yuerong Zhang
Lecturer in Geospatial Machine Learning at the Energy Institute, School of Environment, Energy and Resources, Bartlett College, UCL.