My experience with an AI tool for students
I spoke with a librarian at a local university today, who graciously agreed to let me show them CitationWizard.net. They were impressed and offered to let me do some workshops for students in the fall. I was, and am, elated.
I mentioned that one reason that CitationWizard.net was necessary was that AI often messes up references, and they mentioned that they are recommending scite.ai. I thought I’d better try it.
I asked it “I’m interested in hallucinated citations in social science, and especially education, journals or conference proceedings what do we know?” It spit out a bunch of stuff with some in-text citations that I could mouse-over and see some information about. There was no reference list, which seemed odd (isn’t the point to give students a starting point for their research?). I asked it for a reference list in APA7 format, and it gave me one. Almost all of them were wrong, very wrong. I told it so, and it told me I was right to “push back.”
I asked for a corrected list and it gave me back the exact same list.
You can see the conversation here. I put the references into a word document (I encourage you to try it yourself!). I gave it to CitationWizard.net and it now corrects them all (after a couple of tweaks that just got deployed).
For the most part, the first author last name, the title, and the journal name and volume provided by the AI, were correct, but not the DOI, the journal number, or page numbers. (Without the DOI, how are you going to find the article? I guess you need to do a search for it?) When there is some question about the replacement, your approval is required. Also, if there is much question about the updated reference, search links to Google Scholar and others are provided.
I don’t recommend that you ever let an LLM do anything with references on a paper that you’ve written any part of, but if you do have to work with references that an LLM might have touched, you need a tool that doesn’t use AI to check them. If you’re a human that needs help with your references, give CitationWizard.net a chance. Unlike AI, it has the right data. Unlike Google Scholar, it formats them correctly and provides the DOI. It will even replace the References section of the Word document you provide to it.
CitationWizard.net does this all without AI, and without your paper leaving your browser.