Library Services
This guide © 2024 by UCL - Library Skills is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This guidance presents UCL's general approach to acknowledging the use of generative AI and referencing generative AI. Generative AI (GenAI) is evolving rapidly and there is not yet general consensus on how to acknowledge and reference it. This guidance will therefore continue to be reviewed and updated.
Before using GenAI, you should ensure that:
GenAI can be a useful starting point to gather background information on a topic, but be aware that:
If you do choose to use GenAI tools, you must always:
The use of GenAI must be acknowledged in an ‘Appendix’ or 'Methods' section of any piece of academic work where it has been used as a functional tool to assist in the process of creating academic work.
Minimum requirement to include in acknowledgement:
For example:
I acknowledge the use of Microsoft Copilot (version GPT-4, Microsoft, https://copilot.microsoft.com/) to summarise my initial notes and to proofread my final draft.
Further requirements may be stipulated by a department, academic programme or individual teaching staff, or for a particular assignment, and must be made clear to students when an assignment is set. Additional requirements may include expanded description in an ‘Appendix’ or ‘Methods’ section, such as:
These acknowledgements as an appendix should not be included in the word count of a piece of work, unless stipulated otherwise for a particular assignment or by a particular academic programme or department. The appendix should either be placed at the beginning or end of the document.
Some referencing styles suggest that GenAI systems should be cited in a similar way to other sources, most notably personal communications, but there are issues with citing GenAI systems:
This proposal therefore favours the approach of most academic publishers (1-3), which stipulates GenAI systems should not be cited as an author nor included as a source in the reference list.
There may be cases where it is appropriate or necessary for a student or researcher to refer to AI-generated output within a piece of work and / or include it in a reference list, e.g. where the piece of work addresses the topic of GenAI and discussion around outputs, where there is reference to a formally published output generated by AI, where it is required by the academic department, or where a student has not identified a primary source of the information despite the issues with relying on GenAI as a secondary source of information (which may be considered poor academic practice). Students are advised to check with their department.
In such cases, the output should be treated as a work with no author, unless specified otherwise by departmental guidelines or the standardised referencing style you are using.
Where a student or researcher is required to use a standard referencing style which has specific rules for citing and referencing GenAI, the rules of the citation style should be followed, in addition to acknowledging the use of GenAI as outlined above. This may require the use of in-text citations and reference list entries where the GenAI tool is listed as an author. E.g. APA, Chicago.
Hosseini M, Resnik DB and Holmes K. The ethics of disclosing the use of artificial intelligence tools in writing scholarly manuscripts. Research Ethics. 2023;19(4):449-465. Available from: <doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/17470161231180449>
Acknowledging the use of AI and referencing AI © 2023 by UCL - Library Skills is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0