AI for Researchers · Visual Deck
Getting oriented in a field that is not yours — in four rungs, with the checks that keep it honest
{{Presenter Name}}
Landscape as of August 2026
2-Minute Recap
flowchart LR s1(["1 · Map · Taxonomy
· CRIT"]):::past --> s2(["2 · Discovery
Matrix"]):::past --> s3(["3 · Summary-Trust
Triage"]):::past --> s4(["4 · Policy
Table"]):::past --> s5(["5 · Workflow Canvas
row 6 empty"]):::past --> s6(["6 · today
fill row 6"]):::today --> s7(["7 · deep-
dives"]):::rest classDef past fill:#23204c,stroke:#8f8cb8,color:#b9b7d6,font-size:17px classDef today fill:#ab7d22,stroke:#d9b36c,color:#14132b,font-size:18px classDef rest fill:#23204c,stroke:#55527e,color:#8f8cb8,font-size:17px
Today: the job no colleague has time to do for you — getting oriented in someone else's field,
fast enough to be useful and checked enough to be safe. Rule 2 rides along: rarity moves tasks rightward.
Learning Objectives
Objectives 4–6 next · full verbatim wording in the reference deck and curriculum
Learning Objectives
Full verbatim wording in the reference deck and curriculum
Section 01
Not a confidence problem, and not a you problem. A measured, structural one — and knowing its exact shape tells you what to delegate.
Literacy Foundation — Start With the Prize
Funders ask for it by name — NSF convergence research: "deep integration across disciplines", a "shared scientific language" [15]. The one hard problem: finding the one thing, in a language you do not speak.
The Evidence — Measured, Not Asserted
The payoff is real but delayed: variety and disparity [12] lift long-term citations, depress short-term (3-year) ones [4]; both extremes lose [2] [3] — "a high-risk, high-reward endeavor" across ~900 scientists, 32,000 articles [5]. Indicators "should be interpreted with much caution" [13]: trust the direction, not the effect sizes.
Critical Literacy — The Key Slide
That 34% is about humans, not models — thirty minutes of searching makes you a non-expert with tabs open. This session is about the thirty minutes that does work.
Section 02
Rung 1 of today's workflow — the one thing AI is unusually good at, and the one place it will mislead you most convincingly.
Literacy Foundation
Rule 1 — could you catch the error? — is the entry condition for all of today. A translation you cannot audit is a feeling of comprehension.
The Terminology Trap — One Real Field Pair
Every cell quoted from a guideline or peer-reviewed paper — never a model. Build this for your own field pair: rung 1's deliverable. Two more pairs (sensitivity = recall, PPV = precision [61]) in the reference deck.
The Evidence — Two Results That Should Change How You Prompt
A real trade-off, documented across 53 teams: "between scoring highly for Factuality and… Relevance or Readability" [24]. The rung-1 check: can I find each definition in one field-B review article?
Critical Literacy — Session 1's Rule 2, Quantified
Counterfactual analogies — the core cross-field move: humans 75.3%, GPT-4 (2024) 45.2% [25]; benchmarks favour "vertical step-by-step reasoning typical of STEM" [20]. All of it is Rule 2: rarity moves tasks rightward.
CRIT, Applied — Rung 1
"No papers, no web search" is deliberate: rung 1 is a vocabulary task, and citations are Session 1's Dangerous zone — [21] is why. Papers arrive on rung 2, from a database, or not at all.
Section 03
Rung 2 — where AI stops being the source and becomes the index. Three search geometries, and one question about who decided what field your paper is in.
Literacy Foundation
And the classification you browse is not neutral: WoS assigns "up to 6" categories at the journal level [52]; Scopus, "in-house experts" [51]; OpenAlex per work, automatically — 4 domains / 26 fields / ~252 subfields / ~4,500 topics [49]. Coverage gaps cluster "especially in the Humanities" [42].
Series Artefact — Extending Session 2's Matrix
Every cell from that tool's own documentation, fetched 2026-07-29. Where a vendor documents nothing, this deck says so. Not a ranking.
Series Artefact — Extending Session 2's Matrix
primary_topic: 4 domains / 26 fields / ~252 subfields / ~4,500 topics [49]Two recent changes catch people out: OpenAlex moved to usage-based pricing, and NotebookLM became Gemini Notebook (16 July 2026; re-verified 2026-08-21).
Critical Literacy
A similarity graph [43] and a shortest citation path [44] fail differently; two semantic tools fail the same way. AI makes you faster at crossing fields and science narrower — unless you use it to reach what it would hide.
Section 04
Rungs 3 and 4 — where "significant", "validated" and "replicated" turn out to name seven different things, and combining them naively is the failure mode.
The Evidence
Effects shrink too: half the size [31], 66% of original [32], "about 50%" [33], median 85% smaller [34]. Venues differ: arXiv 3,117,708 submissions since 1991; bioRxiv 37,648 preprints in five years [40]. The rows are not comparable to each other — that is the entire point.
Series Artefact — Rung 4's Gate
The rule: if you cannot answer all five, the finding enters your memo as a question for a colleague, never as evidence — what separates good cross-field work from poor is "how these are combined" [14].
Section 05
The cheapest cross-field tool is a colleague. Here is what AI does for a mixed team — and the four-rung ladder that holds all of today together.
Literacy Foundation
Collaborator discovery is a database query, not a chatbot question: author profiles by topic and institution [49] [56]; funded projects to see who is working on it now [55].
Series Artefact · Today's Canonical Workflow
flowchart LR r1["1 · Translate
→ a glossary
─────
✓ every row vs one
field-B review article"]:::rung --> r2["2 · Map
→ a landscape
─────
✓ rebuilt in a structurally
different second tool"]:::rung --> r3["3 · Read
→ 8 annotated papers
─────
✓ all 8 resolved in a database
✓ 2 of 8 read in full yourself"]:::rung --> r4["4 · Synthesise
→ a one-page memo
─────
✓ Compatibility Check
✓ one field-B reader"]:::last classDef rung fill:#23204c,stroke:#d9b36c,color:#eceaf8,font-size:17px classDef last fill:#1c1a3f,stroke:#c14b58,color:#eceaf8,font-size:17px
You cannot skip a rung — each rung's output is the next rung's input, and each check makes that input safe. Tier 1 → Tier 2 → Tier 2 grounded → Tier 1; Unreliable throughout, Dangerous as evidence at rung 4. Why the checks: clarity is the failure mode [23] · one run is a sample [28] · valid links, 39–77% support [66] [21].
Series Artefact — Session 5's Canvas, Row 6
Three rules: (1) the glossary is the deliverable, not the summary · (2) two tools, or no map [27] [28] · (3) the memo is a list of questions for a colleague — and when you publish, cite across fields, frame within one [8].
Demo Preview — One Field Pair, Twenty-Five Minutes
Everything runs on eight real, DOI-verified papers, six open access, listed in the handout — a pair chosen because discrimination, bias, validation and calibration mean different things on either side of it.
References
References
References