Back to School, Pt. 2: How to Use the ScholarAI Plug-In on ChatGPT
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Back to School, Pt. 2: How to Use the ScholarAI Plug-In on ChatGPT
Aug. 22, 2023
Editor’s note: This is the second installment about tools helpful to journalism students and professors. We’ve launched JournalistsToolbox.ai, a hub for AI-driven tools and resources that will be helpful to professors and students as they navigate their way through AI.
ScholarAI
ScholarAI is is a plugin designed to provide users with access to a database of peer-reviewed articles and academic research. It’s surprisingly good at accurately gathering and summarizing academic research, which makes it valuable to investigative reporters and those doing deep-dive research.
Once installed, you can ask it to search thousands of scholarly publications on a specific topic and summarize it. You also can prompt it to write Twitter threads and other functions using that summary. It provides citations and links to the research as well, so you can fact-check it as you go.
ChatGPT plugins are add-ons you can pair with the AI chatbot to extend its capabilities. These are available through the ChatGPT plugins store. The plug-ins are free, but they’re available only for ChatGPT Plus subscribers ($20 monthly) through the ChatGPT store (see below)
To learn how to install ScholarAI and use it, just read this post I wrote last month for IJNet. It includes some prompts, exercises, training video and specific instructions on how to install the plug-in.
More Teaching Tools
Last spring, I attended a couple of NICAR panels that offered resources for investigating tuition and enrollment equity at universities and HBCUs:
The conference also had some tipsheets for college professors teaching data journalism that are worth a look:
Teach the Teachers: How do you train students and journalists on how to practice data journalism? A group of seasoned trainers offer some excellent tips. | Tipsheet
More Teaching: The Beyond “Skills-Based” session on Contextualizing Data Journalism for Students gives a great overview on how to think through teaching data classes at a deeper level. The quote in the first slide should be shared in every class.
Want More Training?
Contact Mike Reilley at mikereilley1 (at) gmail (dot) com to schedule an AI tools training for your staff.
Also consider a paid subscription to this newsletter or donate to Buy Me a Beer so I can build more training videos.
New in AI Tools
YouPro
A competitor to ChatGPT. You can search, code, write, and create images all in one place.Reflect
A note-taking app with several AI integrations, like a GPT-4 AI assistant and a Whisper AI voice transcriber. You can record a voice note ramble, have the AI assistant turn it into an article outline, then have it rephrase your writing when you get stuck.Guidde
Create how-to guides, video documentation and much more with this Chrome extension.GPTKit
AI-generated text detector tool for ChatGPT
Data + Journalism Textbook
Samantha Sunne and I co-authored a textbook, “Data + Journalism” that’s available on Routledge. (Order here). It’s an introductory- to intermediate-level guide to learning data storytelling from A to Z.
It features examples, interviews, links to tools and dozens of practical exercises to learn how to find, scrape, clean, visualize and write with data. We also explore ethics, transparency and basic math skills. We even offer a bonus chapter — Chapter 13 — on diversity and inclusion for free on our blog.
In Quotes …
“If you’re a reporter, the easiest thing to do in the world is get a story. The hardest thing to do is verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.” – David Halberstam
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