One of the most common criticisms levelled at ChatGPT is that it provides information, but the veracity and accuracy of that information is questionable. This is due to the fact that ChatGPT does not provide sources, footnotes, or links to where it obtained the information used in its answers.
Make ChatGPT Provide Citations and Sources
It will give you sources if you know how to properly prompt it. This is how.
1. Create a question and ask ChatGPT
To begin, ask ChatGPT a question that requires sources or citations. I’ve discovered that asking a question with a longer answer provides more “meat” for ChatGPT to chew on.
Keep in mind that it will no longer be able to provide information after 2021, and requests for information prior to the internet (for example, a paper on Ronald Reagan’s presidency) will have far fewer available sources.
Here’s an example of a prompt I wrote about a topic I worked on a lot in graduate school:
Describe cognitivism, behaviourism, and constructivism as learning theories.
2. Request that ChatGPT provide sources
This is where prompt engineering comes into play. This query is a good place to start:
Please provide references for the preceding answer
This frequently provides offline sources, books, papers, and so on. The issue with offline sources is that they cannot be verified. However, it is a starting point. A better question would be:
Please provide URL references
This instructs ChatGPT that you want clickable links to sources. You can also modify this by requesting a specific number of sources, though your mileage may vary in terms of how many you receive:
Please provide ten URLs
We’ll see what we can do with these in the next step.
3. Make an attempt to verify/validate the sources provided
Remember this golden rule when it comes to ChatGPT-provided sources: it’s more often wrong than right.
Approximately half of the URL sources I’ve requested from ChatGPT are simply bad links. Another 25% or so are links to topics that are completely or partially unrelated to the one you’re attempting to source.
For example, I requested sources for a backgrounder on the phrase “trust but verify,” which is widely attributed to Ronald Reagan of the United States in the 1980s. I received numerous responses, but the majority of them were false.
I received some that led me to active pages on the Reagan Presidential Library website, but the page topic had nothing to do with the phrase in question.
Step 1’s learning theory question went a little better for me. There, I received offline texts from people I knew from my studies who had worked on those theories. I also received URLs, but only about two out of ten of them worked or were accurate.
But don’t give up. The idea isn’t to expect ChatGPT to provide ready-to-use sources.
If you consider ChatGPT as a research assistant, it will provide you with some excellent starting points. Enter the titles of the articles (which may be completely false or simply unavailable) into Google.
That will generate some interesting search queries, which will almost certainly lead to some interesting reads and material that can legitimately be used in your research.
Remember that you are not limited to using ChatGPT. Just because this exists does not mean that all of the tools available to researchers and students should be overlooked.
Conduct your own internet searches. If you have access to primary sources and subject matter experts, use them. If you’re in school, you can even seek assistance from your friendly neighbourhood librarian.
Finally, if you simply copy and paste ChatGPT sources into your research, you will most likely be stung. Use it for hints, not to avoid the hard work of research.
To read our blog on “How to use ChatGPT 3.0 on whatsapp,” click here
