Prompting Generative AI

“Prompts” are what the generative AI world calls the questions or instructions you give a GenAI tool, the rough equivalent of what librarians call “search queries.” The practices that make each one effective, however, are quite different.

Boolean database searches

Work best when they are as compact as possible while still using carefully selected keywords to define the topic’s scope and boundaries.

Generative AI prompts

Work in almost the opposite way. The more detail you give about the topic, the context in which you are asking, how you will use the information, and the response you want, the more useful the result is likely to be.

Build a useful prompt

Optimizing a prompt so that it gives you the most useful response is known as prompt engineering. In practice, this means supplying relevant context, stating clearly what you want, and refining the exchange when necessary.

1. Give relevant context

Give the GenAI your use context, often called framing, and a bare-bones description of your role in that context. This role is sometimes called a persona when you write “I am a...” or role-playing when you write “Assume you are a...” You do not need to provide personal details, only the role that matters to the task.

“I am a first-year student at university and need to write a literature review on [my topic as a plain-English phrase or sentence] for a ten-page English 1010 composition paper.”

This is a prompt template: a tested example with a fill-in-the-blank that you can adapt to your own needs. It is still incomplete, because it supplies framing and a role but does not yet say what you want the GenAI to do.

2. State exactly what you want

Be as specific as you can about what you want the GenAI to provide. If you want it to do more than one thing, give clear, step-by-step instructions and explain how you plan to use the output. Students often begin with paper topics that are too broad, and GenAI tools can be useful for brainstorming ways to narrow them.

“I have to write a ten-page paper for a first-year undergraduate English composition class. My topic is [my topic]. Give me twenty ideas for how to narrow that topic down.”

You can substitute your own course or research context and change the number of ideas you want.

3. Refine the conversation

You can put several steps into one prompt, or ask for them one at a time while referring to earlier answers. Unlike Google and most library databases, GenAI tools build up a working history of your context during a session. You can therefore add constraints, request revisions, or clarify what should change instead of treating the first response as final.

Prompt template: build an EBSCO database search

GenAI can help translate a plain-language topic into an effective Boolean query for OneSearch or another database on the EBSCO platform. The following template gives the tool several steps at once:

“I am a first-year student at university and need to write a literature review on [my topic in plain English]. I will need to find scholarly articles in my library’s research database.

First, help me organize the concepts in that topic into concept clusters.

Then arrange the words and phrases within those clusters into a Boolean search following the syntax rules used by EBSCO Discovery Service: quotation marks around exact phrases; asterisks for stemming words that have variant endings, including singular and plural nouns; OR between words within a cluster; AND between the clusters themselves; and parentheses to group the OR terms into their clusters.”

This template introduces the term concept clusters and then refers to those clusters in a later step. Although the result may not be quite as good as a search developed by an experienced librarian, these queries can be remarkably useful. Review the proposed query before using it; a librarian can often improve the vocabulary, subject headings, and structure for a particular database.

Notice that this prompt asks the GenAI to create a search strategy, not to provide the finished list of books and articles. Public GenAI tools have a tendency to “hallucinate”, to invent citations that look very much like real publications but do not actually exist. Run the proposed query in the library database and evaluate the results you find there.

Prompting for a balanced or focused search

If your topic involves controversy, decide whether you want the GenAI to help you find multiple perspectives or to create a search that favours one position. State that choice explicitly, and include your framing unless you are working one step at a time and can refer back to an earlier prompt.

Focused search

“Help me construct a Boolean search to find articles that support the position that [your side of the controversy] is the best policy for [use context, for particular groups of people, specific goals, etc.].”

Balanced search

“Help me construct a Boolean search that identifies articles providing a mix of perspectives on multiple sides of the controversy about [your topic].”

More about prompting

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