MGMT7020 Chap.1 Academic Evidence and AI Prompting
Academic Evidence and AI Prompting
Why research skill comes first
Week 1 opens with research skill because both topic videos are judged on how well you ground a position in good-quality academic literature.
The seminar models a search that starts wide, with forty or more articles, narrows to a careful reading of twenty to twenty-five, and ends with a defended set of ten to fifteen references, each with a short summary of its purpose and findings.
Prompting with care
The second activity treats generative AI as a collaborator.
You compare a basic prompt with one rebuilt using a role, constraints and step-by-step reasoning, then check both answers for gaps and invented claims.
The chapter closes with the course rules: no AI in the closed-book quizzes, and cited, explained use in the videos.
How this links to the videos and conversations
Both topic videos ask you to take a position on an assigned statement and support it with academic literature and course concepts, and both conversations then question you on that work.
A clean summary table means you can name an author, a finding and a limitation when an assessor asks where an idea came from, which is far more convincing than a general claim that research supports you.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Narrowing a search from forty articles to a final reference set
- 02
Screening an article by abstract, introduction and findings
- 03
Keeping a summary table of purpose, method and findings
- 04
Following reference lists to find more research
- 05
Role, constraint and chain-of-thought prompting
- 06
Checking AI output for gaps and hallucination
- 07
When AI use is and is not permitted in assessment
Worked example · free
Triage five search results for a topic video
- 2Keep (a) and (e): both are peer-reviewed, directly on the statement, and one defines terms while the other tests them recently.
- 1Park (d): it is relevant and written by researchers but is not peer reviewed, so use it to illustrate rather than to prove.
- 1Drop (b) and (c): the blog is opinion without evidence and the abstract reports no findings you can analyse.
Key terms
- Reference Set
- The final group of sources, about ten to fifteen in the Week 1 model, that a video or report actually cites.
- Article Summary
- A short record of a source's purpose, method and key findings, written in your own words.
- Similarity Score
- The overlap a text-matching tool finds between your submission and existing sources.
- Chain-of-Thought Prompt
- A prompt that asks an AI tool to reason through stages before giving its answer.
- Hallucination
- A fluent but false claim, statistic or citation produced by a generative AI tool.
Academic Evidence and AI Prompting FAQ
How many references should a topic video use?
The Week 1 seminar suggests ending with roughly ten to fifteen good-quality references, drawn from a wider reading of twenty to twenty-five articles. Treat this as proportion, not a quota: quality and relevance to your statement matter more than reaching a number.
Is it acceptable to quote directly from articles?
Use short quotations sparingly. The seminar warns that copied passages and long quotes push up your similarity score and hide your own analysis, so paraphrase the finding in your own words and cite it instead.
Do I have to say that I used AI?
For the videos, yes: cite and reference the tools and explain in an appendix how you used them. In quizzes AI is not allowed at all, and suspected use is investigated as a possible breach of academic integrity.
What makes an article good quality for this course?
Look for peer-reviewed journal research that is relevant to your statement, recent enough to reflect current practice, and reports findings you can analyse. Journal rankings such as the ABDC list help as a first filter, but a well-ranked paper on the wrong question is still the wrong paper.
How long should it take to settle on a topic?
The Week 1 lecturer estimates a couple of hours to identify a topic, and warns that it often changes as reading and writing continue. Keep your summary table as the topic moves, because most of the reading usually remains useful under a new angle.
Where should I start searching for articles?
The Week 1 seminar suggests ANU SuperSearch or Google Scholar, filtered with the ABDC journal list. Start with broad keywords from your statement, read abstracts and conclusions first, and then follow the reference lists of strong recent articles to find further research and the names of active researchers.
Exam move
Build your summary table from the first week, one row per article with purpose, method, findings and how it bears on your statement. Rehearse one improved prompt per topic and verify every claim it returns against a source you have read. After the seminar, repeat the prompting exercise on your own video statement and note which claims you had to correct, because those corrections show exactly where AI output needs checking.
Working through Academic Evidence and AI Prompting in MGMT7020? Sia is AskSia’s AI Project Management tutor — ask any MGMT7020 Academic Evidence and AI Prompting question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how MGMT7020 is taught and assessed. Read this chapter free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.