From Field Notes to Final DraftA Guide to AI as Cognitive Scaffolding for Researchers

In the room right now?

Open your workflow map

Fill it in on your phone or laptop as we go. Each stage starts at your table: write how you do it now, then talk. At the end, tap “Submit my answers.” Within a week you get your workflow map: one page built from your answers, with a short note on how to try each thing you ticked, plus the templates, the skills, and the list of ideas the room came up with.

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A 75-minute workshop at the Southern Management Association Annual Meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida, as part of the Professional Development Institute (Track 8).

The idea is simple. AI works best as scaffolding for your own thinking, not as a stand-in for it. For each stage of the research process, you write down how you do it now and compare notes at your table. Then I show the workflow I built for my own research and the alternatives. There is not one right way to do this, and the best ideas in the room are usually not mine.

This is the 75-minute version of the two-hour workshop I ran for the incoming PhD students at Oklahoma State in October 2026.

The five stages

• Discovery. Hold a real conversation with the literature using Zotero and AI. You build the library, and AI helps you search and question it.
• Data collection. Find validated scales and build survey instruments faster. AI helps you find and format them, and you check the original source.
• Analysis. AI writes the syntax and formats the tables. You run it, read the output, and own every statistical decision.
• Writing. Use AI as an editor that critiques your draft after you write it. It coaches, and you write.
• Documentation. Keep a running record of why you made each decision, stored in Notion or Obsidian, so you can find it later just by asking. AI organizes and recalls, and you decide what stays.

Take-home resources

• Workshop hub in Notion: the demo workspace you can duplicate, the skills library with every skill as a downloadable file, setup guides for Zotero and Notion, and the journal disclosure rules (AOM and Elsevier) with sources.
• Your answers: come back to them any time. They stay on the device you filled them in on. Your map comes by email.
• Sign up for the follow-up if you’d rather not submit the map.
• Zotero inline citation macro: the Word macro I use to pull citations from Zotero while I write.
• The room’s ideas. The best ideas shared at the tables will be posted here after the session.

Three rules worth keeping

1. Check every citation. AI will hand you the wrong article with full confidence.
2. Log your AI use as you go. AOM now asks you to disclose it at each stage, and Elsevier wants it in your Methods. A running record makes that a two-minute job.
3. How you use AI is a decision for you, your coauthors, and your advisor or committee. The map is a place to make that decision on purpose.