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Using AI with Medical Research

This guide will help you understand how AI can--and cannot--help you with your medical research.

Article IDs

Article IDs

Currently, ChatGPT fails to provide information for article IDs. For example when I ask about a PMID from PubMed (which is a number assigned to each article in PubMed):

What is the article for this PMID?: 35409935

It takes time to think (about a minute or two) and responds:

I can't access the information directly. However, you can find the article by searching for the PMID on the PubMed website:

  1. Go to the PubMed website.
  2. Enter the PMID 35409935 in the search bar.
  3. Click on the search icon or press Enter.

This should lead you to the specific article associated with that PMID.

When asking for an article using a DOI, ChatGPT both tells me to go elsewhere and gives me a non-existent "link" to the article:

What about for a DOI?: 10.3390/ijerph19074256

You can find the article associated with a DOI by using the following methods:

  • Direct Search:
    • Go to the DOI.org website.
    • Enter the DOI 10.3390/ijerph19074256 in the search bar.
    • Click on the search icon or press Enter.
  • Publisher's Website:
    • DOIs often link directly to the publisher's page for the article. In this case, the DOI 10.3390/ijerph19074256 refers to an article published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH), which is hosted by MDPI.
    • You can go directly to the MDPI website and search for the DOI.

Here's the specific URL for the article:

This will take you directly to the article titled "XYZ" in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

It is interesting that ChatGPT knows the correct journal, but there is no actual link to the citation. It looks like a link, but there is nothing there!

Citations

Writing Citations

ChatGPT gives an interesting response to the following question:

Can you give APA style for PMID 35409935?

Sure, here's how you can cite the article with PMID 35409935 in APA style:

Sone, K., Toyoshima, M., Tsuji, S., Takahashi, Y., Ushiku, H., Hayashi, T., ... & Oda, K. (2022). Molecular subtype classification is a better predictor of the clinical outcome than the anatomical site of origin in high-grade serous ovarian cancer. Journal of Ovarian Research, 15(1), 55. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13048-022-00951-3

The first thing you will notice is that the citation is not quite correct for APA (the indentation is, for example, incorrect). But there is a bigger problem: That is not the correct article! Here is the correct article. It is the same year, but the journal, authors, etc. are different. It is not clear to me what is happening here, but it is clear that a citation tool like RefWorks or EndNote is still needed if you want assistance in collecting, managing, and formatting your citations.