Using Claude for Academic Research: My Workflow and Limitations
as a teacher i use claude for lesson planning and research. sharing my workflow and where it falls short
curious what everyone else thinks. perplexity has basically replaced google for me
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what's your actual prompt structure for lesson planning? like do you give it a rubric or learning objectives first, or just freeform describe the topic?
the limitation nobody talks about: claude's knowledge cutoff hits hard for anything in current education policy or recent curriculum standards. i've had it confidently describe frameworks that got revised two years ago
for research specifically, i always add 'do not invent citations, if you don't have a verifiable source say so explicitly.' cuts the hallucination problem down a lot. still not zero but much better
perplexity for research makes sense but i've found it hallucinates citations more than claude does. claude at least tends to say 'i don't have a source for this' rather than just making one up
yeah perplexity citation quality is hit or miss. the trick is always clicking through to verify - maybe 30% of the sources don't actually say what it claims they say