Unit: Research Skills
Overview
This unit teaches research skills using the ballpark paper as a vehicle: bibliography management, literature discovery, and AI-assisted analysis.
By the end of this unit, students should be able to:
- Build and manage bibliographies with PaperPile
- Discover subsequent literature using LitMaps
- Use AI (iteratively, with both free and frontier models) to analyze research literature
- Critically evaluate AI outputs and identify limitations
Phase: Skills
This unit represents the Skills phase of the course:
- Phase 1 (Tools): Environment Setup
- Phase 2 (Skills): Research Skills ← You are here
- Phase 3 (Artifacts): Contribution
Workflows in this unit
- PaperPile setup and sharing
- Google Drive sync for PaperPile
- LitMaps import and visualize
- Jupyter notebook in Cursor
- Verify MyST tools
- Bibliography setup for MyST
- Add citation to paper
- Add LitMap image and .bib
- AI-assisted subsequent literature section
Assignments in this unit
Key resources
- PaperPile: https://paperpile.com (use JHU credentials)
- LitMaps: https://www.litmaps.com (free account)
- Cursor AI: Model selector for free vs frontier AI comparison