Students will benefit from your guidance on prompt engineering whether they are using generally available AI tools or are encouraged by your institution to use a specific ‘closed system’ tool, The prompts below demonstrate how carefully crafting AI prompts can support student research by helping learners write effective prompts or by allowing AI to assist via meta-prompting (i.e. using prompts that improve your prompts). It all begins with your own exploration, so you can effectively guide learners to properly, and cautiously, utilize both general AI tools and the new more specialized AI-research tools now available.
General purpose AI chat tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot)
Refine research
“I’m studying [topic]. Ask me five questions that could help narrow this into a researchable question.”
“Help me identify what’s too broad or vague about my research question: [insert question].”
Build search strategies
“Act as a librarian. What subtopics or search terms might I use in an academic database to explore [topic]?”
“Suggest academic keywords and synonyms I could search for in databases about [topic]. Explain which might appear in titles vs. abstracts.”
“List potential Boolean search strings to explore [topic] in scholarly databases.”
Understand scholarly contexts
“Summarize the main debates or tensions the scholars discuss in the following article. Don’t give me conclusions, just outline the arguments. [attach article or link]”
“Help me identify key scholars or landmark works that are frequently cited on [topic].”
Evaluate and synthesize sources
“Summarize the article I found. Identify the research question, methods, and findings. [attach article or link]”
“Based on these abstracts, what themes or gaps appear across the research? [paste text]”
Support writing and analysis
“I’ve drafted a thesis statement: [paste text]. Suggest questions I should answer with evidence to support it.”
“Give me an outline framework for a literature review on [topic], but don’t fill it in.”
Meta prompting
Prompt refinement
“I want to use AI to explore scholarly perspectives on [topic]. Help me write a prompt that is specific and academically focused, encourages critical thinking, and avoids summarizing or generating fake citations.”
“Suggest three improved versions of my draft prompt: [paste prompt].”
Role based
“Rewrite my prompt so that the AI responds like a subject librarian or research mentor rather than a content generator. Here’s my current prompt: [paste].”
Critical thinking
“Improve my prompt so that it pushes for multiple perspectives or competing interpretations of [topic], instead of a single summary.”
