Research You Can Defend

The failure that ends academic work is not a badly written paragraph — it is a citation that does not exist, or a claim attributed to a paper that says something else.

Generative models fabricate citations that look completely real: plausible authors, plausible journal, plausible year. This chapter is about making that impossible to reach your submission.

Use the right tool for the job

• Finding papers: a research tool that searches actual literature, not a general assistant recalling from training
• Understanding a paper you have: upload it and ask questions grounded in the text, with page references
• Checking a claim: an answer engine that cites sources, then open the sources
• Structuring your argument: a general assistant, using material you have already verified

Grounded reading of a source

Once you have the actual paper, comprehension is where these tools are strong and reliable — because the answer is in front of them rather than being reconstructed.

I am attaching a paper. Answer only from it.

1. What question is this paper trying to answer?
2. What did they actually do — method, sample, duration?
3. What did they find? Quote the key result sentence exactly.
4. What do the authors say are the limitations?
5. What does this paper NOT show, that someone might wrongly cite it for?

For each answer, quote the sentence and give the section or page.
If the paper does not address something, say "not addressed in this paper" rather than using general knowledge.

Question five is the important one

Most citation errors in student work are not fabrications — they are over-claims, where a paper showing a modest correlation is cited as proving causation.

Asking what the paper does not show protects you from the most common and most damaging kind of mistake.

Keep sourced and unsourced separate

Structure your notes so that anything you can point to a source for lives in one place, and everything else — your own reasoning, things you half-remember, things the model asserted — lives somewhere clearly marked.

Once those two are mixed, you cannot untangle them later, and you will end up citing something you never read.

A verification pass before submitting

1. List every citation in your work
2. Open each one. A link that does not resolve is a fabricated source
3. Confirm the source actually says what you claimed, in the sense you claimed it
4. Check every number, date and name against the source
5. Delete anything you could not verify — softening the wording is not a fix