BIO100 - Introduction to Biology: Starting your Research

Biology research can be fun and rewarding, as long as you’re using the correct tools!

Some basics:

• Biology can be a competitive field, and studies show that the rush to publish leads to a small-medium percentage of research papers have some falsified or exaggerated components. Scientists are using AI to generate images and figures for their papers, and it’s not working out that well. You’re very likely at some point in your time studying biology to come across an article with at least some integrity issues. You will need to understand, to a basic degree, some red flags, and how to review the literature to corroborate study findings, when possible. 

• You’ll want to use good search strategies to find your topic, including finding out alternate names for organisms or diseases, using ANDs and ORs in your database searching, and using filters in your search results. More on this under the “Finding Secondary Sources” tab.

• AI can be used in some aspects of studying Biology. A good way to use a chatbot is to have it help you study. It’s very good at this! It’s NOT good at creating images, coming up with lists of articles, and it won’t necessarily be able to summarize an article in a way that’s useful to you.