Business fields · Research & Science

AI training for Researchers

Academic work is shaped by literature reviews, data analysis, grant writing and publication pressure. Generative AI can help at every stage: navigating and summarising the literature, sharpening research questions, writing analysis code, polishing manuscripts and preparing funding applications. AI agents can automate recurring steps such as data cleaning or cross-checking references. At the same time, AI touches core questions of research integrity: who is an author, how is AI use disclosed, how do you prevent fabricated references? Researchers therefore need more than prompting tricks – they need a methodologically sound, transparent and reproducible way of working with AI tools.

Who is this course for?

  • Doctoral candidates
  • Research associates and postdocs
  • Professors and research group leaders
  • Research offices and grant managers
  • Corporate R&D teams

Typical challenges we address

  • An ever-growing body of literature that is hard to keep up with
  • Heavy writing load for proposals, reports and papers
  • Data analysis that requires programming skills
  • Uncertainty about AI rules set by journals, funders and universities

Practical scenarios from your field

Navigating the literature

AI summarises abstracts and full texts, extracts methods, samples and findings into comparison tables and helps formulate search strings for scholarly databases – every source is then verified in the original.

Sharpening research design

Research questions, hypotheses and operationalisations are stress-tested with AI as a critical sparring partner to spot gaps, confounders and alternative explanations early. Control conditions and limits to generalisability are discussed as well.

Writing analysis code

Researchers without deep programming skills use AI to produce Python or R scripts for data cleaning, statistics and visualisation, documenting them clearly to ensure reproducibility.

Revising manuscripts

AI supports language editing, structuring and shortening of academic texts, checks terminology for consistency and helps draft responses to reviewers without taking over authorship. Your argument stays your own.

Preparing grant proposals

Funding guidelines are turned into checklists, work packages and milestones are structured, and sections such as impact plans or lay summaries are drafted in several versions.

Analysing qualitative data

Interview transcripts and open-ended responses are pre-coded and grouped thematically with AI; researchers review, refine and document the coding frame according to established methodology. Inter-coder checks remain essential.

Possible hands-on projects

Literature matrix

A small app for logging studies with method, sample and key finding, filtering them and exporting a table for the state-of-the-art section.

Data dashboard

An internal tool that reads measurement data from CSV files, runs plausibility checks and displays trends and outliers interactively. Publication-ready exports are included.

Proposal checker

A tool that compares a draft proposal against a stored checklist of funding requirements and flags missing mandatory sections or exceeded page limits.

Data protection & compliance

Codes of research integrity apply: AI cannot be an author, its use must be disclosed and all references must be checked against the original. Personal research data, for example from studies involving participants, is subject to the GDPR and ethics approvals; unpublished results and peer reviews must be treated as confidential.

Prerequisites

Experience of academic work in a discipline; programming skills are helpful but not required.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use AI to write my PhD thesis?

That depends on your doctoral regulations and institutional policies. AI is often permitted for language editing and brainstorming if its use is disclosed and your own intellectual contribution remains clear. In the course you learn to document use properly and assess common grey areas with confidence.

How do I avoid fabricated references?

Language models can produce plausible-sounding citations that do not exist. Work with tools that query real databases, ask for DOIs and verify every source in the original. The course demonstrates a workflow that combines AI-assisted searching with reliable reference management.

Request without obligation

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Total €949 plus VAT