Knowledge making in the era of Artificial Intelligence

Project summary

Writing for publication is not an isolated task but a socially regulated process involving collaboration, feedback, and disciplinary socialisation—especially for Early Career Researchers (ECRs). When these social processes are mediated or replaced by AI tools, there is a risk that academic writing may shift from a reflective, interactive endeavour to a more uniform and less accountable one.

This project seeks to elucidate how AI is reshaping early career researchers’ (ECRs) writing for publication—a key practice in the construction and dissemination of academic knowledge. Drawing on applied linguistics, social regulation of learning, and critical AI literacy, the project investigates: (1) how AI alters the regulatory micro-processes involved in academic writing; and (2) how these changes affect rhetorical and linguistic diversity in academic texts. Through a longitudinal, micro-ethnographic study with nine ECRs from diverse disciplines, we will combine multimodal data (keystroke logging, screen capture, interviews, and writing drafts) with corpus-based genre and AI-assisted analysis of published articles.

This is the first study to examine self-, co-, and socially shared regulation in AI-assisted writing-for-publication contexts. We will clarify when and why writers turn to AI tools, how these interactions shape their authorial agency, and what consequences this has for the production and perception of scientific knowledge. The project will generate urgently needed insights to inform responsible digitalisation in higher education and research. Its outcomes will support evidence-based policies, training, and ethical AI design—ensuring that digital tools enhance rather than erode scholarly integrity, diversity, and the societal value of academic knowledge

Raffaella Negretti is Professor in Educational Psychology and Applied Linguistics. The focus of her work is on learning processes and cognition, specifically self-regulated learning and metacognition, applied to academic and scientific writing, writing for research purposes, genre pedagogy, and higher education. Her work examines the development of expertise in scientific communication, including how writing stimulates cognitive development, critical thinking, and creativity. Currently, she is leading research projects on topics such as writing expertise in doctoral education, communication of scientific knowledge beyond academia and trust in science, academic literacy in AI-supported scientific writing processes, and micro-processes of learning and writing.

Contact: Raffaella Negretti

Baraa Khuder is a Senior Lecturer and an applied linguist specialising in academic writing and scholarly communication, with a particular focus on how academic knowledge is created, negotiated and communicated. Her research examines academic writing from socio-political, cognitive and metacognitive perspectives, focusing on power dynamics, feedback practices, authorial voice, research integrity, and the ways in which technologies shape writing processes and products. 

Contact: Baraa Khuder

Moa Johansson is Professor at the Departement of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University. Her research interests include an diverse mix of applications of AI: from maths and automated reasoning to sports science and natural language processing for political science.

Contact: Moa Johansson

Theresa Lillis is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Applied Linguistics at The Open University. Her main research area is writing, which she has been researching for some 25 years from a perspective that can be summarized as the politics of access, location, production and participation. She is committed to using ethnography as an overarching research methodology and has an ongoing interest in developing ‘text-oriented ethnographic approaches’, using a range of methods.

Contact: theresa.lillis@open.ac.uk