Investigating institutional support and PhD students' perspectives on AI integration in scholarly research: Insights from the Moroccan context

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly increasing across various fields, including academia. AI tools are becoming more popular among researchers, scientists, and students, helping with tasks like generating text, conducting literature reviews, summarizing, analyzing data, and more. Existing literature highlights how these tools enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the research process. However, ensuring innovation and quality in academic research requires an understanding of how researchers perceive and utilize AI in conducting research, as well as the level of institutional support provided. This study focuses on gaining insights into the perspectives of PhD students regarding the use of AI in their research, and examining the extent of support offered by Moroccan universities in training students to use AI tools appropriately, responsibly and ethically. For doing this, a quantitative approach was employed, using a structured online survey with a Likert scale. The study examined PhD students in the English department in various Moroccan universities using a structured online survey. Results show that most of PhD students use Free AI tools in their research activities. They use AI while conducing research for tasks such as suggesting topics, finding relevant sources, grammar checking, paraphrasing and summarizing. The study also explored that ChatGPT, Grammarly, QuillBot, Zotero and Mendeley are the most commonly used AI tools by PhD students. The participants also declared that AI improves the efficiency and productivity of their research. Most importantly, it was revealed that there is an obvious lack of institutional support regarding the AI integration in scientific research. This research will provide evidence-based recommendations for enhancing research quality and innovation and ensuring that future researchers are equipped with the necessary tools and knowledge to conduct research.