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Harbingers-3

Early career researchers … continued

Harbingers-3 is a continuation of a world-wide project we began in 2015: Harbingers — a longitudinal study of 'digital natives', young researchers who had yet to achieve established or tenured positions.

Harbingers-3: a longitudinal, international study of early career researchers’ engagement with generative AI

Once again we will be studying the work lives, prospects and scholarly communication, behaviour and attitude of today’s novice researchers. However, Harbingers-3 — will do so with particular reference to the current interest in generative AI.

Led by David Nicholas the international research team includes: Abrizah Abdullah,, Blanca Rodríguez-Bravo, David Clark, Eti Herman, Hamid R Jamali, Jorge Revez,, Marzena Świgoń, Anthony Watkinson, Jie Xu, and Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri.

Harbingers-3: a longitudinal, international study of early career researchers’ engagement with generative AI

Generative AI has attracted much attention this past year. It could be yet another false dawn, and suppositions of human-level intelligence are certainly overblown, yet this may be an advance in automation as significant for scholarly production as word-processing and desktop publishing, the internet and the web. Maybe it will come to naught but it is causing a stir and will leave a mark. There is a gold-rush in progress, a lot of Nvidia GPUs are being sold.

There is little empiric evidence available regarding the practice, process, advantages, disadvantages or risks of using generative artificial-intelligence tools in research. This is a state of affairs that needs to be redressed: if these tools do prove to be influential, changing the way we conduct research, the effects on the efficacy and integrity of the body of human knowledge may have far-fetching implications for all. The investigation proposed here aims to address the knowledge gap via a study of early career researchers (ECRs) — tomorrow’s professors and scholarly influencers, whose millennial mindset may render them especially open to change. 

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The Project

Harbingers-3: a longitudinal, international study of early career researchers’ engagement with generative AI

Project Publications

Harbingers — an international research project (2015–2024)

Project Reports — Harbingers 2