Introduction to Scientific Research

Academic Year 2026-2027

Building a literature review with open bibliographic databases and artificial intelligence tools, then communicating your work: papers, software, persistent identifiers and research assessment.
doi:10.1000/182 swh:1:dir:…

Module Overview

Overview

Two sessions, one complete journey

The module follows the life cycle of a research project: first finding and synthesising existing work, relying on open bibliographic databases and on artificial intelligence tools without trusting them blindly; then communicating your own results in a durable, citable and assessable form. Each session ends with an assignment on your own project topic.

Lectures

Introduction

Doing Research

From a question to a scientific contribution: methods, evidence and sharing knowledge, illustrated through my work on data integration, urban data and knowledge graphs.

5 slides with detailed public explanations.

View Introduction (in French)
Lecture 1

Literature Review with AI

What a literature review is; open bibliographic databases (OpenAlex, Wikidata, Scholia); mapping a field with Connected Papers; reading and summarising with large language models; conversational research agents and RAG; verification, reference management and integrity.

View Lecture (in French)
Lecture 2

Communicating Research

Papers, journals, workshops, conferences and proceedings; peer review; persistent identifiers (DOI, ORCID, SWHID); publishing and archiving software with Software Heritage; journal and conference rankings, DORA and research assessment; negative results and open science.

View Lecture (in French)

Tools and Resources

Bibliography

OpenAlex and Wikidata

Open index of the scholarly literature, and free knowledge base queryable in SPARQL; Scholia profiles generated from Wikidata.

OpenAlex
Wikidata Query Service
Scholia
Exploration

Mapping and agents

Graphs of similar papers, and conversational agents that answer from retrieved papers.

Connected Papers
Semantic Scholar
Elicit
Publishing

Archives and identifiers

French national open archive, universal source code archive, and persistent identifier for researchers.

HAL
Software Heritage
ORCID
Assessment

Rankings and DORA

Computer science conference ranking, journal ranking, and the declaration on research assessment.

CORE
Scimago
DORA
References

Zotero

Free and open-source reference manager: import by DOI, PDF and note storage, BibTeX export.

zotero.org