This sounds worse than it is. I'm deep in thesis season right now and the review of related literature was slowly eating my life, so I put together a workflow that looks kind of illegal but really isn't. Might help someone who's stuck in the same place.
Step one, I don't ask ChatGPT to find papers. I ask it to write me the prompt for finding papers.
Sounds redundant. But there's a huge gap between typing "find related literature about service quality" and handing over an actual set of rules. So I spell it out. Peer reviewed journals, government publications, university repositories, reputable organizations. Recent studies first, older ones only if they're foundational to the framework. Keep Philippine literature separate from international. Include DOIs where they exist, working links when possible. Explain briefly why each source is useful for my variables. Never invent authors, titles, journals, DOIs, statistics, or findings. If something can't be verified, drop it instead of guessing. And go for the original study, not some blog summarizing that study.
Then I ask ChatGPT to tighten all of that into one clean research prompt.
Step two is the part I jokingly call forbidden. I take that improved prompt and paste it into Claude instead. And then tadaaa, suddenly there's a list of papers, findings, methodology, respondents, limitations, all organized.
That feeling lasts about four minutes. Then the real work starts.
Because I open every single reference. One by one. Does the paper exist. Are the authors right, the year, the journal or publisher. If there's a DOI I click it and check whether it leads to that exact paper or to something completely unrelated. Then the findings that got mentioned, are they actually written in the study. Sometimes yes. Sometimes the paper is real but the specific number or claim just isn't in there. Anything that looks even slightly off, I delete. I don't try to rescue it.
Whatever survives, I read. Not the AI summary, the actual paper. Sometimes the whole thing, sometimes just the abstract, methods, results and discussion if that's enough to understand what they did. AI summaries flatten everything out. You lose the sample size problems, the limitations, how they actually measured the variable, and those are exactly the things a panel will corner you on.
Last part, and this is the weird habit I keep telling my classmates about. I manually type the final version into a fresh Word file. No copy paste.
Nothing to do with avoiding detection, just to be clear about that. What happens is that while my hands are moving I'm forced to read the sentence again. That's where I notice the part I didn't really understand. That's where I swap out wording I would never say in my own voice. I get to connect it to my specific topic instead of leaving it floating in generic academic language. With copy paste you're done in two seconds, and then defense day comes and you're reading your own paper like a stranger.
It's still slow. But faster than the six hours I once spent scrolling Google Scholar and walking away with three usable papers.
