Citing AI
Guidelines on citing AI are evolving, do your best with the current information, and if you are unsure, always check with your instructor.
Citing helps us give credit to the content creator and allows your reader to access the sources you used to determine credibility and conduct their own research. With this in mind, it is helpful for the reader to understand when and how you used generative AI. You should not treat AI as an author, either as a co-author of your work or the author of sources you may be citing. Instead, AI should be treated as a tool you used, similar to a statistical software package used to analyze data, or other tools a researcher may need to cite to demonstrate their methods.
Documenting AI Use
When incorporating AI-generated content into your own work be transparent about what you used and how you used it. Documenting your AI use is helpful both for building formal citations, but is also a good practice for keeping track of the specific prompts and outputs of any particular AI model. These are some of the elements to keep track of when using AI
- The name of the AI tool used
- The name of the version of the AI tool (ex. ChatGPT 3.5)
- The company that made the AI tool
- The prompt used in your AI interaction
- The date the content was generated
- What final content was generated by the AI tool
- Take screenshots/transcripts of responses
- Describe what AI-generated content is included, what you used it for. For example, if you only used it to generate an outline, but didn’t use any written content.
Citation Examples
Major style manuals each have their own guidelines when it comes to citing AI. Check out these guides below for more detailed information:
For more help, you can reach out to a librarian at library.help@usu.edu
Secondary Sources
Answers and responses generated by AI can be a good way to learn more about a topic and discover more in-depth sources. While some AI tools provide actual citations, models such as Chat GPT are widely known to fabricate false, but realistic-seeming references.
Even when you can verify that a citation is actually real, it can sometimes be difficult to determine exactly how a source was used and what parts of a source were used to contribute to the AI output. For this reason, it is always important to check the citations provided by AI to ensure they are both real sources and are accurately incorporating information from the original source. When in doubt, you should use the original source the AI used, rather than the summary output it provides.
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