How To Use Claude For Academic Research (My Actual AI S… — Transcript

Prof. David Stuckler demonstrates how to use Claude AI with connectors and skills to enhance academic research workflows efficiently and ethically.

Key Takeaways

Using Claude with connectors significantly reduces AI hallucination by accessing verified academic sources.
Consensus and PubMed connectors are powerful tools for health and scientific research literature searches.
Integrating productivity tools with Claude enhances time management and communication for researchers.
Skills enable automation of repetitive research workflows, increasing efficiency and consistency.
Claude serves as a complementary tool to Google Scholar, especially for precise and forensic literature searches.

Summary

Professor David Stuckler shares his AI research stack focusing on Claude, highlighting its use for academic research.
He explains how connectors give Claude access to real peer-reviewed sources and productivity tools, reducing AI hallucinations.
Consensus and PubMed connectors are emphasized for retrieving reliable scientific literature.
Claude can integrate with productivity apps like Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Canva, and Zoom to streamline research tasks.
The video shows a live example of using Claude with connectors to pull accurate research data on community college student outcomes.
Claude complements Google Scholar by providing faster, forensic searches for known topics with real source citations.
Skills in Claude allow automation of repetitive research tasks and standard operating procedures through customized prompts.
A demonstration of a topic validation skill shows how Claude can guide researchers in refining their research questions.
The approach aims to save time, improve research quality, and leverage AI ethically without sponsorship or commercial bias.
Overall, the video provides practical steps to set up and use Claude for academic research effectively and for free.

Chapters

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Are you using clawed skills and connectors for your research? If not, you're missing out. You're practically living in the stone age. I'm Professor David Stuckler. I published over 400 peer-reviewed papers in my research career as a professor publishing

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reviewing for a living. And in just a few short years, my core workflows in research have completely transformed with AI. And while some of you may be concerned about the ethical and right way to do things, what I'm going to do

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in this video is I'm going to show you some practical things, the same things that I do. I'm going to open up my AI under the hood so you can see my actual stack, how I've loaded up connectors and

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skills, and how you can do so today for free. It's going to save you a ton of time. I look, if I were where you are, I just it's amazing what you can do so much more than I could do 20 years ago

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when I was a graduate student because you now have this tremendous power at your fingertips. So, I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to show you how I use Claude. I have shifted over to Claude from chat GPT and I think you'll

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see why by the end of this video. So I want you to pull up Cloud. Uh you'll see a lot of different options for projects, artifacts, scheduling tasks. Go on the lefth hand sidebar straight to customize. Again you'll see a lot of

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options. What I want you to do is scroll down here to customize and go let's go first to connectors. And what the way to think about connectors is that it gives Claude vision. It gives it vision into tools and software you already use on

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your computer. It's going to have two main purposes for us. One is it's going to give us greater vision into real peer-reviewed sources. I'm going to show you how to sync that up in a second. And this massively helps solve the

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hallucination problems of AI just making up references that has become prevalent over the past several years. The second is going to be to sync into your email, to-do lists, and other productivity tasks to save you time and enable you to

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activate some dead spaces in your day and sync things up on the go, especially from your cell phone, which can feed into cloud. The way you're going to add connectors, you're going to click on the top right, click add, and any of the

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connectors I show you here, you can do immediately, and they're valuable and free. So, the first one, and probably most powerful one that I use all the time now, is consensus. I was skeptical at first because of the hallucination

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problem, but what I've come to learn is Consensus has brokered agreements with a lot of publishing houses. So, they get full text sources, some that your universities may not even have. It's free version. I'm not sponsored by them.

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You got to be really careful with influencers out there who are pedaling AI products and getting kickbacks. I get no kickbacks. I'm not selling you any AI software here. I'm not sponsored by Claude either. But, Consensus uh gives

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you up to 10 searches free and beyond that it is paid. This has, I'll show you in a second, has begun to sit kind of on the same pedestal as Google Scholar in my search strategies. I'll show you a

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live example in a minute. So, you basically go to ad browse connectors. I'm not going to show you it all here.

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Click consensus. Load it up. The other thing that's really valuable that I use all the time, uh, if you're doing any health research is PubMed. This enables you to directly search and retrieve articles from PubMed in your Claude

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research related queries. other ones that are very good right now. I'm constantly curating and updating these.

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These are the ones I use at the moment. This bioarchchive and clinical trials as these emerge. I'll keep you posted. The second category uh is going to be productivity tools. So, Canva, this is great. This is where I make a lot of my

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academic presentations. Cloud will produce PowerPoint or PDFs for you that you can use, but setting this up and syncing it to Canva. It's just more beautiful and it's easier for you to modify and create highquality academic presentations that will literally knock

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their socks off. So, this is great. The other thing for productivity tools, I use Gmail or Outlook. This enables me to not just check my email draft responses, but also load up drafts and email them to people right away. It saves me a ton

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of time. It enables me to check my tone in felicities of expression. I can even with the right prompting get emails written in my own voice. Google calendar for scheduling meetings on the go. These are completely free. Connectors

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encourage you to use it. To-do list. I I use this as a to-do app. I have my oldfashioned list of things to do that I write down. But I also have this on my computer so I can keep track. Zoom as

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well. There are a range. But if you're not using these, you're completely missing out. Also, I love this mirror whiteboard tool because I find a lot of the researchers I work with are quite visual. So that covers connectors. So,

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let me show you an actual search. So, I was one working just the other day and I wanted to pull up a query from scientific literature. I didn't want just Claude making something up or hallucinating references. And let me

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show you what that looked like. So, I was chatting with a researcher who was trying to understand why uh community college students were often flunking out when they got into four-year universities in the US and what they could do about it, what transition plans

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were needed. And I asked it here, what you're going to do is say, check the consensus connector for studies. and I asked it to map out gaps. This was a conversation I was having with the researcher. But what's great here is you

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see this is pulling up real research studies and citing it. And you can see the summary a meta analysis of 62 studies found this and you'll be able to check that this is not hallucination because you can go open up the actual

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paper go right to the source. This will have details about the source research in higher education citation some other details and the abstract. Sometimes you get the full text here or you can pop this into Google Scholar and then get it

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that way. Okay, but this is massively powerful. I still use Google Scholar for my lit review searches. It's a bit like oldfashioned going to the library and in the library on the shelves you might bump into other papers you didn't think

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about or realize were important. But when I'm doing a forensic search and I know exactly what I'm looking for, let's say I wanted to find, you know, hey club, find me a site on how much pre the prevalence of autism has risen over the

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risen over the past 20 years. This will forensically go into PubMed and pull me real sources that gives me exactly what I want. So when I know what I'm looking for, I already know what good looks like, this is going to get it faster for

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me than what Google Scholar can generally do. I still like Google Scholar, how it sourced by relevance.

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It's getting to the most highly cited papers right at the top. It's helps me see how many citations they have. So that that's a very useful platform and consensus is still partial. So you can't completely rely on this, but as a

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complement to Google Scholar, it is fantastic. The second part I want to show you that is very valuable in what you can customize is skills. I often talk about how as researchers, especially at an early stage, you need

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to tap into leverage so you're not just doing one project, one paper, and one burnt out researcher at the end of it.

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Especially if you're starting to build teams and get leverage, you'll often find that, like I did, you're repeating the same things over and over. You're doing similar tasks over and over. And skills captures what businesses call standard operating procedures. And you

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can set up that standard operating procedure and load it as a customized prompt to run every single time. Cloud can make this for you. So if you find yourself having a set of instructions that you need to deploy, you can just go

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browse and you can actually create your own skill. Ask Claude to make a skill following this set of instructions. I've made a series of skills uh because it saves me a ton of time around peer review around validating topics. Um and

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they integrate with our course material and the step-by-step processes that we follow. I'll show you an example in a second, but typically you'll just go upload the skill and then you can invoke the skill later on when you're uh having

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a normal chat with Claude. Let me show you a topic validation skill because I have a a procedure that I use all the time where first you get in the topic neighborhood then you want to go through a phase of testing establishing and

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validating the topic and then usually we have a third phase of human judgment and vetting and this then the researchers I work with have this as complimentary and embedded into the courses we use to find their topic and so we're again

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constantly staying on top uh so you don't have to of the best AI ethical uh workflows and skills. So let me show you an example. So I'm here. I'm pretending to be someone who's completely lost and I say, "Hey, I'm looking for a topic on

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educational inequalities. This is a good topic." And I'm going to pull up I'm put slash. When you see you pull slash here, it enables you to pick up your skills and pick which skill you want to use.

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And I've set it up to say, "Hey, what what kind of topic is this for? Is it systematic review? Is it for a dissertation? Is it a quantitative paper, qualitative paper?" Because the algorithm you're going to use to find

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your topic is going to be different. And so I said systematic review here. And this is set up to sync with our system.

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So, don't worry about that too much, but it'll get straight to the point that there's no topic to test yet. And it spotted that quite nicely. It's like having a conversation with me. And it tells you how to fix it. And this is

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using I can see it's using our convergence method here. Making sure you stay true to your passion. It also in our phases uses things that are part of our systems like you got to find your nearest neighbor paper. You're going to

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use Pico to make sure your topic's crystallized. You're going to do a duplication test and a feasibility test along the way so you get real indicators that your topic is good. And it'll tell you what to do. I've left this skill

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below. uh for you to check out and you can download and and you just upload it just like I showed you here. Going into customize and go into add a skill and curious to know what what you guys

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think. How are you using these connectors and and skills? I'm constantly testing, vetting, and validating these so that you can use AI workflows and save a bunch of time in in your work and and stay on the right side

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of angels so that you're blameless and don't do anything that that's on the wrong side of that ethical fence. If you do want to learn more about using AI and integrating it into your research in a customized way, click the link below,

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check out our mentorship communities, and see if we are a good fit to work together. and look forward to seeing you guys in the next

Topics:Claude AIacademic researchAI connectorsConsensusPubMedGoogle Scholarresearch productivityAI skillsresearch automationProfessor David Stuckler

What are connectors in Claude and why are they important for academic research?

Connectors give Claude access to external tools and verified academic sources, such as Consensus and PubMed, which help reduce AI hallucinations by providing real peer-reviewed data.

How does Claude complement Google Scholar in literature searches?

Claude offers faster, forensic searches when you know exactly what you're looking for, pulling real sources directly, while Google Scholar is useful for broader searches and citation tracking.

What are skills in Claude and how do they help researchers?

Skills allow researchers to automate repetitive tasks and standard operating procedures by setting up customized prompts, increasing efficiency and consistency in research workflows.

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