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Showing posts from May, 2026

Using an LLM to Find Themes in an Academic Career

B rief recap In an earlier post, “Same prompt, four AIs: why answers aren’t always the same” , I looked at what happened when the same prompt was given to four different LLMs. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the answers were not identical. That raised an interesting follow-on question: what was the prompt actually trying to do? The answer is that it was trying to support a form of thematic analysis. In that case, the object of analysis was an academic profile, including my Google Scholar profile. The version I discuss here is a modified prompt, used with Claude.ai, where I uploaded a CV and asked the system to find other appropriate public resources connected with a named person and institution. The aim was not simply to summarise the CV, but to identify visible and less visible themes across a whole career. Why use thematic analysis? Thematic analysis is widely used by academics, especially in qualitative research. Braun and Clarke’s well-known paper, Using thematic analysis in psy...