Working through papers with ChatGPT
Triaging a reading list, pulling structured summaries out of papers, and the two things you should never trust it on.
The situation
Twenty papers, and you need to know which three are actually about your question. Reading all of them properly is a week you do not have.
What people use it for
- Triage a reading list down to what is genuinely relevant
- Pull the same structured summary out of every paper so they can be compared
- Get oriented in a field that is not yours
- Draft the peer review comments a hostile referee would return
Worth knowing first
It cannot see your figures. Every plan except Enterprise discards images from uploads, so anything that only appears in a chart is invisible to it. And it invents citations, so check every reference against a real database.