The research question I used for this assighment was my research question in rhet 1020 which was “How does the lack of autonomy and relatedness affect orphaned children, and what can be done to improve these areas?”

For this research I mostly used regular ChatGPT and Google Scholar. ChatGPT was helpful for brainstorming ideas, generating research questions, and fixing grammar but it wasn’t able to provide credible scholarly and peer-reviewed sources. It didn’t even say that it couldn’t it just gave links that are not working and kept generating words. The Dr. advised us to use Google Scholar to find sources and I did it actually gave me reliable scholarly articles. Unfortunately for my research topic which was particularly studies about orphaned children in Egypt there were not many available sources available, which made the search hard. Until a friend of mine advised me to use preplexity last minute which I will explore how helpful it was in this assighment. I also tried Gemini deep search for the sake of this assighment and asked it the same research question to see if it could have been a helpful tool when I was doing this research.

I used Gemini Deep Search for the first time for this assignment. I asked it to “Provide peer-reviewed studies or scholarly articles on autonomy and relatedness in orphaned children, especially focusing on development and emotional outcomes.” At first, Gemini interpreted my prompt as a request for it to do the entire research for me. It generated a long report and even included sources and I had to wait couple of minutes for it and it was actually very professional and it gave me a rich background information about the topic however, that wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I wanted sources from researchers who wrote in this topic. So, I rephrased my prompt “I don’t want you to do the research I want scholar sources for studies that already exist on autonomy and relatedness in orphaned children.” After this, Gemini provided relevant scholarly sources some of them I remember that I actually used in my paper and others could also have been useful. I think knowing about Gemini deep research earlier would have made my research process easier.

I also used Perplexity to find sources for my research. A friend recommended it when I was struggling to find enough studies about orphaned children in Egypt. When I used Perplexity I didn’t find it as smart as ChatGPT in talking it sounded more robotic than it should however it was much smarter in providing real scholarly sources and links to studies. It worked really well for finding sources it didn’t gave me fake links it get gave me a lot though that were relevant but not exactly what I wanted so I had to use very specific prompts to get exactly what I wanted.

So to compare both Gemini and Perplexity I think both did a good job providing sources much better than ChatGPT. Gemini was smarter than perplexity in my opinion as It gave me lots of information the problem was that It really wanted to do the whole thing it self but that is okay because first it contained information about the topic that was important for me to know and because once I adjusted my prompt it understood quickly and gave me what I want which was something I didn’t expect. I didn’t have this problem with preplexity since it didn’t try to do anything but find sources for me its like it knew its job the only problem was it was more robotic like I mentioned it sticked to my orders and gave me all sources it have regarding what am saying so I had to keep narrowing it dow for it to give me what I wanted exactly. So I think both tools would have been helpful and I would use both in any upcoming research to find the sources for articles I want. Compared to google scholar I find them much faster since google scholar give more vague results and I actually have to go through part of each one and it can be irrelevant in the end. I also understood how there are better options than ChatGPT to work as search engines especially for scholarly sources that could save much time. I am now more curious to try the rest ai tools that I don’t know about that might be helpful.