Artificial Intelligence (AI): Supporting Evidence-Based Practice With AI
Generative AI can be a valuable tool for summarizing research to support evidence-based practice (EBP) for clinicians; however, caution must be exercised when using AI for this purpose. AI generated responses are not a substitute for clinical reasoning or evidence-based decision-making.
Clinicians should be mindful about the quality and hierarchy of the presented evidence. AI tools may not distinguish between high-quality, well-controlled studies and anecdotal sources or uncontrolled studies. EBP requires the clinician to implement evidence-based decision making through the lens of their own experience and judgment. Therefore, AI should be considered a support tool and NOT a substitute for clinical reasoning or decision-making. Similarly, AI tools do not inherently incorporate patient preferences, cultural considerations, or shared decision-making principles.
Clinicians may find summaries of research findings helpful. This can assist with several clinical activities, but you should be careful to not assume that AI-generated summaries are accurate, unbiased, or thorough. Efforts should be made to check the accuracy of these summaries. Any AI generated evidence summaries must be balanced with patient-centered care principles. AI outputs are NOT peer-reviewed or critically appraised so they should be treated as a starting point and not a definitive source.
When used to summarize research articles, AI tools may commonly:
- provide summaries that are too simplistic and miss the nuance of specific findings;
- make faulty conclusions;
- make conclusions based on the article’s introduction or discussion sections rather than any new, original findings reported in the article; and
- generate inaccurate or fake citations.
In your prompts, always ask the AI to provide sources—and then, check those sources to confirm that
they exist and are accurately cited,
are trustworthy, ideally from high-quality, peer-reviewed, and published research, and
actually say what AI attributes to them.
When using generative AI tools that allow users to upload research articles, it is important to review the article’s copyright permissions.
Transparency and reproducibility are paramount when you incorporate content—text, images, or other media—created by a generative AI tool. If you plan to use the AI summary for your own practice only, keep a record of which prompts and which generative AI system you used. If you plan to disseminate the information in any way—such as in a presentation or as written instructions for caregivers—always cite your use of AI.
APA Style guides provide a quick reference for how to cite AI that takes the guesswork out of what information to track and share. Keep in mind that an AI citation may go beyond a typical journal article citation—because you cannot recreate the exact AI response, even with the same prompt. Therefore, you need to include enough information, so that another person doing the same search could reasonably expect to find similar results.
