Scientific Writing Style
8 Best Practices for Using AI When Writing Scientific Manuscripts
Discover 8 best practices for using AI when writing scientific manuscripts to improve clarity, accuracy, and efficiency.
Mar 31, 2025
Scientific manuscripts are your ticket to sharing groundbreaking discoveries with the world, but let's face it: getting your research into words can feel like a marathon. Juggling data, ensuring clarity, and maintaining that precise scientific writing style can bog you down. What if AI could help lighten the load with scientific writing style powered by AI?
Using AI responsibly allows you to speed up your research and writing process without sacrificing quality. This guide will arm you with best practices for using AI in scientific writing, so you can focus on what matters: the science. Meet Otio, your AI research and writing partner. With Otio, you can unlock faster, more efficient research and writing, freeing up your time for the scientific insights that matter most.
Table Of Contents
8 Best Practices for Using AI When Writing Scientific Manuscripts
Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today
Benefits of Using AI for Writing Scientific Manuscripts
Speed Up the Writing Process
AI tools automate tedious writing tasks like grammar checks and formatting. This means researchers can spend less time on these details and focus more on creating content. The result? You get your manuscripts done faster.
Catch More Errors
AI uses natural language processing to find mistakes you might overlook. It spots errors and inconsistencies, helping you produce work with fewer mistakes. It’s like having an extra set of eyes looking over your shoulder.
Make Your Writing Clear
AI tools can suggest more straightforward ways to phrase things, analyze your text's flow, and make complex language more straightforward to read. This is helpful if you’re trying to communicate with people outside your field.
Help for Non-Native Speakers
If English isn’t your first language, AI can help improve your writing. It offers real-time suggestions for sentence structure, word choice, and grammar. This support can make your manuscripts more transparent and improve your chances of publication.
Boost Your Skills
AI writing tools give you immediate feedback, helping you correct errors quickly. This real-time assistance can speed up your writing skill development, especially if you’re a student or early-career researcher.
8 Best Practices for Using AI When Writing Scientific Manuscripts
1. Streamline Your Research with Otio
Feeling overwhelmed by the endless sea of content? Otio is your all-in-one tool for navigating it. Gone are the days of juggling countless apps to keep your research organized. Otio lets you gather data from various sources—bookmarks, tweets, or even YouTube videos. It then helps you distill this information into clear, AI-generated notes. But that's not all: Otio assists you in crafting initial drafts from the collected materials, making the journey from raw data to polished draft a breeze. With features like AI-generated notes and a chat function that lets you converse with your data, Otio becomes your research and writing partner, helping you work faster and wiser.
2. Be Open About AI Use
Transparency is key. When you use AI tools in your manuscript, say so. The American Chemical Society (ACS) advises that any AI involvement should be disclosed in the Acknowledgment section. If the AI plays a more significant role, provide more details in the Methods section or wherever appropriate. This helps maintain trust and integrity in your work.
3. Keep Authors Human
AI can’t be an author. Only humans can be responsible for and accountable for published work. Make sure everyone listed as an author meets the criteria for authorship. Acknowledge AI assistance separately as previously discussed. This distinction is crucial for maintaining the integrity of academic authorship.
4. Verify Everything
AI tools are great, but they’re not infallible. Always double-check the information they produce. AI models can generate biased or incorrect content, especially in technical areas with sparse training data. As an author, you must ensure that all text in your manuscript is accurate and reliable.
5. Ethical Peer Reviewing
Using AI in peer review can be problematic. It might compromise confidentiality and the quality of the evaluations. Reviewers should rely on their expertise and keep manuscript details away from AI, which could breach ethical guidelines.
6. Know the Journal’s Rules
Before submitting your work, familiarize yourself with the journal’s policies on AI. For instance, ACS Publications has specific guidelines covering transparency, authorship, and AI-generated graphics. Awareness of these rules can save you from unnecessary headaches during submission.
7. Understand AI Limitations
AI tools can churn out content that sounds plausible but is wrong or nonsensical. They might also reflect biases present in their training data. Always critically review and edit AI-assisted content to maintain the scientific rigor of your work.
8. Responsible Graphics Use
When you use AI to create images or graphics, disclose it in your manuscript's captions or relevant sections. Ensure that the terms of use for the AI tool allow for commercial use and that your graphics don’t infringe on intellectual property rights. This kind of transparency is crucial in maintaining ethical standards in scientific publishing.
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10 Best AI Tools for Writing Scientific Manuscripts
1. Streamline Your Research with Otio
Researchers often grapple with content overload, piecing together various tools to manage information. Otio offers a smooth solution by providing an AI-native workspace. It lets you gather diverse data sources—like bookmarks, tweets, and YouTube videos—into one place. With AI-generated notes and source-grounded chat, Otio helps you extract key insights. Drafting papers becomes easier as you can create outputs using your collected sources. Unlike ChatGPT, Otio even enables chatting with individual links or entire databases. Its web scraping features allow access to non-traditional academic sources, saving time and effort. Try it for free to see how it can be your research partner.
2. Enhance Source Quality with Scite
In academic writing, validating the quality of your sources is crucial. Scite goes beyond finding citations; it shows how those papers are cited in other studies. This gives you insight into whether other researchers support or dispute a paper. It’s a vital tool for ensuring the credibility of your references and strengthening your arguments.
3. Find the Right Words with Thesaurus.com
Thesaurus.com is the top online thesaurus for finding synonyms. It categorizes synonyms based on different meanings, using shades of orange to indicate relevance. However, avoid overusing synonyms in your writing. Precision matters more than variety, especially with field-specific terminology. Be cautious and use synonyms sparingly to maintain clarity in your work.
4. Organize Your Writing with Scrivener
Scrivener is designed for long-form writing, making it perfect for research papers. You can break your paper into sections, rearrange them, and keep all your research notes in one place. It’s like having a filing cabinet instead of a pile of notes. This organization can significantly enhance your writing process and efficiency.
5. Transcribe with Ease Using Otter
Otter is a transcription tool ideal for researchers who must transcribe interviews or dictate ideas. It’s AI-based and works for English recordings, offering real-time transcriptions. While not always perfect, the quick transcriptions can be a great starting point and save you time. Otter provides 300 minutes of free transcriptions per month, making it a valuable resource for those on a budget.
6. Back Up Your Writing with Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI assists with writing while providing relevant research data. It helps generate content and ensures reliable sources support every statement. This makes it ideal for drafting sections like literature reviews or discussions where evidence integration is key. You can trust that your work is grounded in credible information.
7. Collaborate Effectively with Authorea
Authorea is “Google Docs for scientists,” allowing you to write, edit, and insert citations, figures, and data. It’s great for collaborative writing, as co-authors can access the text simultaneously, track changes, and insert comments. You can even live-chat during writing sessions. The platform supports document imports and exports, streamlining your workflow.
8. Streamline Research with Elicit
Elicit helps you find and integrate research data while writing. It focuses on scientific and academic studies, making it ideal for researchers needing peer-reviewed sources. As a research assistant, I gather and summarize studies, helping you draft sections that rely heavily on existing research. With quick access to credible studies, citations, and evidence, Elicit simplifies the drafting process.
9. Manage References with Zotero
Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager without skimping on functionality. You can easily save references, organize them in folders, and create bibliographies in the right style. It also allows you to share your citation library with co-authors or collaborators. This makes it an excellent choice for academic writers looking to streamline their referencing process.
10. Enhance Clarity with QuillBot
Paraphrasing is essential in research writing to avoid plagiarism and present ideas. QuillBot helps you transform dense academic text into more straightforward language. This can improve the readability of your work and ensure that your ideas are communicated effectively. It’s a valuable tool for anyone looking to enhance the clarity of their writing.
11. Simplify Your Writing with Hemingway Editor
Research papers can become overly complicated, sacrificing clarity for complexity. Hemingway Editor makes your work crisp and clear, crucial for effectively conveying your findings. It helps you identify sentences that are too complex or wordy, allowing you to refine your writing for better comprehension.
Risks of AI-Assisted Scientific Writing
AI and Inauthentic Sources: A Tricky Pair
AI can be a wildcard with the sources it pulls. These tools are built on rapidly evolving algorithms that fetch answers to your queries or prompts. Owing to advances in computation and the rapid growth in the amount of data that algorithms can access, these tools are often accurate in their answers. But sometimes, they slip up and give you inaccurate data. Worse, the data might look solid, sneaking into research articles. This could mess with scientific credibility and lead to a chain of falsification in the research community. Scrutinizing information and data sources provided by AI is a must to avoid this pitfall.
AI and Data Leakage: A Risky Pair
AI is now an integral part of scientific research. From data collection to manuscript preparation, AI provides ways to improve and expedite every step of the research process. However, AI needs access to data and adequate computing power to process it efficiently. Many AI applications meet these requirements by having large, distributed databases and dividing the labour among several individual computers. These AI applications need to stay connected to the Internet to work. Therefore, researchers who upload academic content from unpublished papers to platforms like ChatGPT are at a higher risk of data leakage and privacy violations.
Otio: Your AI Research and Writing Partner
Otio also strives to minimize the risk of data leakage. Our policy on using AI and AI-assisted technologies in scientific writing aims to provide more transparency and guidance for authors, readers, reviewers, editors, and contributors.
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Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today
Ever found yourself juggling a bunch of apps just to get through your research workflow? You're not alone. With the flood of content available, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Researchers, students, and knowledge workers often use tools like bookmarking apps, read-it-later services, and note-taking software. It's like trying to solve a complex puzzle with mismatched pieces. The rise of easy content creation only adds to this overload. You need a way to manage all this information without losing your mind.
Say Hello to Otio: One Workspace to Rule Them All
Enter Otio, a game-changer for researchers. This AI-native workspace consolidates your entire research process. Think of it as your assistant. First, it helps you collect data from diverse sources, from tweets and YouTube videos to scholarly articles. Next, it extracts key insights, offering AI-generated notes and source-grounded Q&A chat. Finally, it helps you create draft outputs using your gathered sources—all in one place. Consider moving from a reading list to a first draft faster than ever before. That’s the potential of Otio.
Top Features Researchers Love: AI-Generated Notes and More
What makes Otio a favorite among researchers? Its AI-generated notes feature automatically summarizes bookmarks, YouTube videos, PDFs, and articles. Like ChatGPT, you can chat with individual links or entire knowledge bases. Plus, AI-assisted writing helps you draft research papers and essays with ease. These features save you time and effort, allowing you to focus on what truly matters—your research.
Web Scraping for Diverse Data: Beyond Traditional Sources
Otio’s web scraping capabilities set it apart from other tools. You’re not limited to traditional academic papers or search engines. Instead, you can access many data sources like bookmarks, tweets, books, and YouTube videos. This makes it easier to curate and analyze diverse information for research purposes. It’s like having a virtual library at your fingertips.
Why Wait? Let Otio Be Your AI Research and Writing Partner
Ready to transform your research process? Otio offers a free trial so you can experience its benefits firsthand. With its AI-native workspace, you’ll streamline content collection, extraction, and creation—all while reducing content overload. Try it and see how it can make your research journey smoother and more efficient.
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