## The role of AI

In Searchlight Basic, you have seen how you can use AI effectively when you are familiarizing yourself with your topic. You can also make good use of chatbots when defining your topic and formulating your main question and sub-questions. But you can also misuse them, for example by asking ChatGPT to refine your main question, or to formulate sub-questions on the basis of it. In the short term, this may be convenient, but you will learn little from it. You could, however, ask the chatbot to take on the role of supervisor and ask you critical questions about your input, and in this way, through a question-and-answer process, properly formulate your main question and sub-questions.

ChatGPT 5.1, dd. 2026-13-03

In this phase, specialized AI tools can help you obtain a quick overview of the scientific state of affairs in a particular field. They can even help you identify sub-areas that have not yet been researched and define concepts and terms. Try tools such as Elicit, Consensus or Scispace for this. It does help if you already have some prior knowledge of your topic. Only in this way can you properly assess the information you obtain. Moreover, this is about a quick overview, not about thorough literature research. In addition, these tools do not search in all scholarly literature, but mainly in open access articles.