Best AI Prompts for Researchers
Prompts for reading, synthesising and analysing material you supply, with guardrails against invented citations.
Language models are useful research assistants and unreliable sources. They summarise and organise well; they also produce confident references that do not exist. Every prompt in this collection is written around that fact: the model works from the papers, notes, transcripts or data you paste in, and is told to say what the material does not support.
Use the summary prompt for a single paper or report, the literature review prompt once you have several, and the data analysis prompt for tables and small datasets. The interview guide and market research prompts cover primary and secondary research planning.
Where a task depends on current sources, a tool that searches and cites, such as Perplexity, is the better place to run it — and the citations still need to be opened and read.
The prompts
Research Paper and Report Summary Prompt
Summarises a paper or report by claim, method, evidence and limitation instead of paraphrasing the abstract.
Source-Bound Literature Review Prompt
Synthesises supplied sources by theme and disagreement, and refuses to cite anything you did not provide.
Show-Your-Working Data Analysis Prompt
Analyses a pasted table step by step, shows its working and states what cannot be concluded.
User Interview Discussion Guide Prompt
Writes a discussion guide with open, non-leading questions mapped to what you need to learn.
Desk Market Research Brief Prompt
Plans and structures market research with explicit sourcing requirements.
Customer Review Analysis Prompt
A qualitative coding exercise on review text: themes, frequency in the sample and representative quotes.
Competitor Analysis Prompt (From Your Own Research)
Structured comparison from supplied information, useful for desk research write-ups.