Tanuja Bodas
AI in Education
PharmaTech
MY ROLE
UX Researcher
DURATION
18 weeks (Jan 2024 - May 2024)
TEAM
4 Researchers
Team Lead
CHALLENGE
UNDERSTANDING gEN ai CHATBOT USAGE FOR RESEARCH
Pharmacy students and faculty increasingly experiment with GenAI chatbots for literature review, writing support, and data analysis. However, concerns around accuracy, privacy, plagiarism, and academic integrity create hesitancy and limit adoption.
THE PROCESS
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
methodologies
Desk Research
Analyzed 30+ scholarly papers, articles, and reports on AI in education, healthcare, and research.
Competitor Scan
Evaluated tools like DiagnaMed’s Dr. GenAI, Novo Nordisk’s Sophia, Grammarly, Research Rabbit, and Tutor.ai
Survey
Collected baseline data on chatbot usage frequency.
Interviews
12 semi-structured interviews of pharmacy students at Thomas Jefferson University
Stakeholder
Department Chair of Pharmacy at Thomas Jefferson University
Analysis
Card sorting clustered into Needs, Goals, Pain Points, and Key Insights
KEY FINDINGS
How students actually use AI
Students usually stick to trusted sites like PubMed, NIH, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar when digging up research. They do use AI to rephrase or summarize stuff, but they don’t fully trust it to be accurate.
What’s not working for students
Students feel stuck when there’s no real tech help and the free versions won’t even let them upload PDFs or images. They also worry that their data isn’t private and that using AI for writing could accidentally land them in plagiarism trouble.
What would make life easier
Students want AI tools that can handle more than just text like letting them upload images or pull in illustrations for their projects. They’d also feel better if the answers came from trusted research databases, had built-in plagiarism checks, and gave quick, accurate responses without making them too dependent on the tool.
STAKEHOLDER PERSPECTIVE
Faculty value innovation but worry about students’ critical thinking, privacy risks, and dependency on AI
PROBLEM DEFINITION
Hesitance to use GenAI chatbots in research due to concerns about accuracy, privacy, and plagiarism.
OPPORTUNITIES AND DESIGN DIRECTIONS
Merging tradition with innovation
Students want a research buddy they can actually trust, one that only pulls answers from solid places like PubMed or NIH. It should check for plagiarism, help manage citations, and even let them upload PDFs, images, or datasets. On top of that, they want to know their questions stay private and aren’t being stored anywhere.
BENEFITS AND ROI
Why This Really Helps
With AI pulling from trusted databases, students can get reliable results without second-guessing. It helps them save a couple of hours each week on literature reviews, while also giving access to research that’s usually behind paywalls. For the university, it’s a chance to show leadership by embracing innovation in learning and research.
LIMITATIONS
the downsides we noticed
AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on, so if that data’s outdated or wrong, the answers will be too. Students and faculty might also need some training to use these tools properly, and without strong privacy protections, there’s always a risk of sensitive info leaking.
REFLECTIONS
Looking Back
In short, AI chatbots are super helpful for saving time and making research easier, but they still need to be more reliable when it comes to giving accurate answers. Fixing that gap is key to unlocking their full potential as real game-changers in pharmacy research and learning.
©2025 Tanuja Bodas