This report looks at how higher education faculty in the USA are using mainstream generative AI applications as well as specialized scholarly AI programs for content discovery and summation. The 138-page study gives extensive information on faculty use of a plethora of AI applications, including, but not limited to, Research Rabbit, Semantic Scholar, and Connected Papers. In addition, the study gives detailed data on use of ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, CoPilot and Claude by college faculty. The study also looks at how scholars evaluate their use of AI, presenting data on just how much more, or less productive faculty feel that use of AI has made them. Beyond use of AI for specific analytical or writing tasks, the study also presents detailed data on the extent to which AI is replacing traditional search engines. Through data and open ended questions, the report paints a picture of how college faculty and currently using AI in their scholarship.
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
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College faculty use ChatGPT a mean of 37 minutes per week.
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4.55% of faculty had ever used Semantic Scholar.
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30.4% of faculty in fine arts and architecture routinely use AI in searching for journal articles or other research content.
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Nearly 26% of male survey respondents feel that training in AI applications is a high or very high priority for them.
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Faculty in law and education/library science were the most likely to report high productivity gains from use of AI.
Data is based on a survey of 660 higher education faculty broken out by numerous personal and institutional variables enabling readers to pinpoint differences in attitudes and policies towards AI by variables such as gender, ethnicity, academic field, academic title, college type, college size and many other characteristics.