Course Overview

This course equips participants with the art and science of designing effective prompts for AI tools like ChatGPT, enabling smarter research assistance. Focused on academic applications, participants will learn how to frame, refine, and iterate prompts to maximize accuracy, depth, and relevance of AI outputs for research tasks such as literature review, data analysis, theory building, and academic writing.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the fundamentals of prompt engineering and why it matters in research.
• Design prompts for literature search, gap identification, and systematic review support.
• Apply structured prompts to summarize, synthesize, and critically analyze academic sources.
• Use iterative prompting to refine research questions, hypotheses, and theoretical frameworks.
• Generate effective prompts for qualitative coding, quantitative analysis guidance, and visualization support.
• Build custom prompt templates for academic writing tasks (abstracts, introductions, methodology sections, peer review responses).
• Learn techniques for role-based prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and meta-prompting.
• Optimize prompts for AI-assisted reference management and citation accuracy.
• Recognize limitations, biases, and ethical considerations in prompt design.
• Leverage AI with well-crafted prompts for faster, more reliable, and reproducible research outcomes.

Tools & Resources

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Elicit, Research Rabbit, Scholarcy, Connected Papers, Scite, AI-based reference tools, and customized prompt libraries.