ScholarAI: A Game-Changing Chat GPT Plugin for Journalists

To be honest, I'm not wild about some of the new AI tools that have flooded the market over the past year. They can save time, but they also take shor

Photo by ilgmyzin on Unsplash

To be honest, I'm not wild about some of the new AI tools that have flooded the market over the past year. They can save time, but they also take shortcuts and can produce as much fact as fiction, which is dangerous for journalists who work with the former over the latter.

However, some have proven to be accurate and useful, including Scholar AI, a ChatGPT plugin for journalists who write in-depth or investigative stories based on academic research.



It is surprisingly good at accurately extracting and summarizing academic research. Once installed, you can ask it to search and summarize thousands of scientific publications on a given topic. You can then ask him to write a Twitter thread or add viral hooks to social media using this summary, among many other tasks (tip pages, other summaries, etc.). Best feature: It provides citations and links to studies so you can check as you go.

Deployment with plugins

ChatGPT plugins are add-ons that you can bundle with it to extend its capabilities. They are available from the ChatGPT plugin store. The extensions themselves are free through the ChatGPT Store, but only available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers (Plus costs $20 per month) through the ChatGPT Store. To access plugins, click the three dots in the bottom left corner of the interface, go to Settings and make sure the Plugins option is enabled (green).



Then click the GPT-4 button at the top of the ChatGPT interface and make sure the extension option is selected (it may be the default). A small drop-down menu and icons may appear below the GPT-4 interface, allowing you to access the GPT store from the drop-down menu. You can install as many plugins as you want, but you can activate up to three at a time. Search the store and download some plugins that you find useful. There is a list of some of them at the end of this exercise. After installation, make sure that ScholarAI is one of the activated plugins, although ChatGPT should be the default.

 Exercise: Study the abstract and the Twitter thread

Try loading the first prompt into the text field below at the bottom of the interface and press Enter:



Use ScholarAI to summarize residential segregation in New York City

If it returns results that should include links to citations, type this prompt:



Now write a Twitter thread about it and give me five viral hooks and hashtags

Now try the same exercise, but with your own instructions and topics.

 Fact checking

As with any study, you should check ScholarAI's results and facts. You can do this by clicking on the article titles referenced in each research abstract. You must edit the Twitter thread carefully. Mine needed a few minor changes before posting, but overall it worked pretty well. I usually edit some of the hashtags it creates and remove all emojis from tweets, especially on sensitive topics.

But even if it takes time to edit, check and write research and tweets, the process is much faster than, for example, using Google Scholar and writing the tweets yourself.

If you don't want to use AI-generated tweets, try split testing with employee-written tweets. Ask your best social media producer to write a thread and tweet with AI generated tweets simultaneously on different days. Then go to analytics.twitter.com, download the table of tweets and see which ones have the most engagement. You might be surprised.

For more useful ChatGPT plugins, visit the JournalistsToolbox.AI ChatGPT page.

If you need a little more help with ScholarAI, here's a tutorial video with all the steps.