This project is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
in partnership with the United Kingdom Metascience Unit and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Understanding scientific reading
in the age of LLMs
Ethnography
Increasingly more scientific reading begins with a prompt.
Understanding Scientific Reading in the Age of LLMs is an ethnography of how this transformation is enacted in the practices of researchers. Through interviews with life scientists, neuroscientists, and other researchers in the US, Europe, and Oceania, the project traces how AI-augmented tools are reorganizing the unglamorous work of reading: how scientists discover papers, parse arguments, take notes, and construct overviews of a field.
Participants describe new forms of confidence and new forms of doubt. Certain shortcuts compress hours of work, whereas verification extends it in other ways. Some speak of LLMs as collaborators with patchy memory; some as tools that makes English-language scholarship navigable for the first time. Many describe slipping, almost imperceptibly, from reader to orchestrator, although this might be yet another shape of reading.
The project asks what kinds of reading these tools cultivate and how the labor of interpretation is being rearranged as a result. The aim is to understand how this new category of tools is reshaping what it means to know a field.
Understanding Scientific Reading in the Age of LLMs is an ethnography of how this transformation is enacted in the practices of researchers. Through interviews with life scientists, neuroscientists, and other researchers in the US, Europe, and Oceania, the project traces how AI-augmented tools are reorganizing the unglamorous work of reading: how scientists discover papers, parse arguments, take notes, and construct overviews of a field.
Participants describe new forms of confidence and new forms of doubt. Certain shortcuts compress hours of work, whereas verification extends it in other ways. Some speak of LLMs as collaborators with patchy memory; some as tools that makes English-language scholarship navigable for the first time. Many describe slipping, almost imperceptibly, from reader to orchestrator, although this might be yet another shape of reading.
The project asks what kinds of reading these tools cultivate and how the labor of interpretation is being rearranged as a result. The aim is to understand how this new category of tools is reshaping what it means to know a field.