At many universities in Uganda today whenever a discussion about writing scholarly research papers in the era of artificial intelligence, you can hear students talking about ChatGPT and other AI tools almost everywhere.
A student who has been given a course assignment can open a phone, type in the question and, within seconds, get several pages of work. What used to take a student many hours in the library can now appear on the screen in less than a minute.
A few months ago, a young lecturer at one of our universities in Uganda told me something interesting. He said he was no longer very worried about students copying work from Wikipedia. His worry now is mostly about students who take a topic, put it into an AI tool and, in less than a minute, get something that looks like a complete academic paper.
“It has a good introduction, proper paragraphs and references that look real, it even sounds intelligent,” he said.
This is the situation we are currently in. And the concern is that, if AI can write an assignment, a report or even a scholarly paper so quickly, why should researchers still spend weeks doing research and writing scholarly papers for publication?
I believe scholarly writing is still important because a research paper is not only about the words on the page. The words are only the final part of the work. The most important part is the research behind those words.
A researcher has to identify a problem, ask questions, collect information, study the evidence and make sense of what has been found. Sometimes the information is not clear. Sometimes the researcher has to go back to the field and ask more questions.
At the end, the researcher must be ready to explain and defend the findings. Of course AI can help with some of these things, but it cannot do everything for the researcher.
A recent review by Lilia Raitskaya professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations which was published in the Journal of Language and Education (2025) looked at how generative AI is being used in academic writing and publishing.
The findings revealed that the concern is no longer just about whether researchers should use AI. Instead, researchers are now asking how AI can be used while making sure that human beings remain responsible for the work.
Another review by Hui Li Hui Li Chair Professor at Education University of Hong Kong and Xiao an Wu at Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, Nanjing, China , looked at studies on how researchers are using AI in academic writing indicated that AI is becoming part of the writing process, but it is mainly being used as a tool to assist the researcher. It does not remove the need for the researcher.
Therefore, a very important issue here is human responsibility. At the end of the day, there must be a person who can explain where the information came from and defend what has been written.
AI can know a lot about the world, but it may not know what is really happening in our universities, villages, newsrooms, churches and mosques. For example, if I want to understand how social media is affecting the academic performance of student at Makerere University, I still need to go to the students and collect information from them.
AI tools can help me prepare a questionnaire, organize my data or improve my writing. But it cannot replace the actual experience of collecting information from those students and understanding what their answers mean. This is why I believe we should continue writing and publishing scholarly papers in the AI era.
The purpose should not simply be to produce many pages of writing. The purpose should be to produce knowledge that is based on real evidence and can help other people understand and solve a problem.
So, let us use AI. Let it help us work better and faster. But let the research remain ours. Our evidence, our thinking, our judgment and our name should remain behind the conclusions we publish.
So yes, keep publishing. Just make sure it is your evidence, your judgment, and your name behind the conclusion.
The writer is a Journalist, Media & Communication Specialist and Current Affairs Analyst.
