How to write research news using AI

What you need to write news with AI

As source material for your news texts, you should use the scientific article, ideally combined with a popular‑science summary or the researchers’ answers in the form for research news provided by the Communications and Public Relations Office, hereafter referred to as the news submission form.

To achieve good results, you also need a clear and well‑defined instruction – a prompt.

How to write a good prompt

Here are some general prompt tips to help you get the best possible output:

• Give the AI a persona/role. Ask the AI to act as if it were a journalist or communications officer at Karolinska Institutet.
• Give the AI a task with clear instructions. Include details about the text’s format, length, which researcher should be quoted, and how many quotes to include. Be as concrete and specific as possible.
• Provide context/background information. Explain what type of text you want, what it will be used for, what tone it should have, who the sender is and who the audience is. Tell the AI that you want a news article from a medical university based on a scientific publication, written to be understandable for an upper‑secondary school student.
• Feed the AI with examples. You can attach examples of other news articles from ki.se that you want it to emulate, or upload documents with language guidelines.
• Restrict what the AI is allowed to do. When information is missing, AI text‑generation tools tend to invent details in order to produce an answer — what is often referred to as hallucinating. Therefore, you should instruct the AI to rely only on the information you provide or ask it to highlight if other sources have been used. This sometimes works — but not always.
• Have a dialogue with the AI. Improve the text step by step by giving feedback until you reach the result you want. You can, for example, ask the tool to be more creative, adjust the headline/standfirst, rewrite paragraphs you are not satisfied with, add missing elements, or change the tone of the text.
• Do not forget to ensure quality and accuracy — see the section “Editing AI‑generated drafts” below.

Ready-made prompts for the news format

Below are some examples of prompts for the news format. To find prompts in Swedish, please change language version of this page. 

It is of course possible to change the length of the news article, remove the instruction to quote a researcher or give the AI generator other examples of news articles or headlines. Don't forget to include the summary, news submission form, or PDF of the scientific article together with the prompt and to start a new topic for each new article you write. 

If you want to write a news article with questions and answers, you can use Copilot to create a good introduction and headline. You can find the prompt below. Use Q&A 1-4 of the news submission form or questionnaire as the body of your news article. 

Add quotation signs (“) around each answer. The answer to the first question ends with /…/", says [researcher's name, title, and department]. 

Prompt for standard news article with headline, lead, and quote

Act as a communications officer at the medical university Karolinska Institutet. Write a popular science news article about a new study in [name of the journal] based on the summary below. The article should be in English, about 2,000 characters long, and understandable to a high school student. Use a journalistic structure, including a headline, a lead, body text, and one or two quotes by the researcher [researcher’s name and title] at the Department of [name of department]. Only use the information provided. If you are unsure of any facts, ask me questions or let me know that you are unsure. Use a neutral tone and avoid superlatives. 

Write the article in the same style as this news article: news.ki.se/early-body-contact-develops-premature-babies-social-skills

SUMMARY: [Paste the researcher's summary, or alternatively Q&A 1-4 and the news summarized in one sentence from the news submission form. If space is limited, you can remove the questions and only include the researcher's answers. If you give Copilot access to a PDF of the scientific article, write that and include the title of the PDF in the prompt.]

Prompt to write headline and lead for a Q&A news article

Act as a communications officer at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and help me write a catchy headline and a short, journalistic lead/introduction summarizing a new study [alternatively review] in the [name of journal]. The lead should be two or three sentences long and mention both the name of the journal and Karolinska Institutet. The headline should not be longer than ten words. Only use the questionnaire below to write the lead and the headline. If you are unsure of any facts, ask me questions or let me know that you are unsure. Use a neutral tone and avoid superlatives.

Write the headline and lead in the same style as this news article: news.ki.se/cbt-improved-quality-of-life-in-patients-with-atrial-fibrillation

QUESTIONNAIRE: [Paste Q&A 1-4 and the news summarized in one sentence from the news submission form.]

Prompt for writing a news headline

Act as a communications officer at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and help me to write a good headline for my news article. The headline should be:

• A catchy phrase that captures the reader's attention and summarizes the news article's content.
• Short and concise, not longer than 10 words.
• Informative, simple, and clear, without unnecessary technical terms or abbreviations.
• Neutral and without exaggerations or evaluations.

Here are some examples of news article headlines:
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy tested for post-covid conditions
A sleep-deprived brain interprets impressions negatively

NEWS ARTICLE: [Paste your news article in the chat box or give Copilot access to it as a PDF or webpage/link].

Prompt for news article about a doctoral thesis

Act like a communications officer at Karolinska Institutet and write a news article about a recent doctoral thesis. Base your article on the summary provided in the thesis, which can be found at the specified link below. Exclude any subheadings such as ‘method’ or ‘conclusion’. The article should be written in English, approximately 2000 characters of length and be comprehensible to a high school audience. Use a journalistic format, including a headline, lead, body text, and one or two quotes by the doctoral student [name] from the Department of [name]. Ensure that only facts from the summary is used. If there is any uncertainty regarding the details, it must be clearly indicated in the text. Maintain a neutral tone throughout and refrain from using superlatives. Conclude the article by mentioning that the thesis was supervised by [name of supervisor] and note that the defense is scheduled for [date].

Please follow the writing style of this news article: news.ki.se/a-sleep-deprived-brain-interprets-impressions-negatively

Thesis summary to be used as source for the news article: [thesis url in KIB’s Open Archive]

Editing AI‑generated drafts

AI‑generated texts should always be treated as a first draft. Once you have received your draft, you will need to review and revise it. This work consists of three parts:

1. Fact‑checking. The information in an AI‑generated text is not always correct. The editor and the responsible researcher must therefore verify all factual details. You can also question whether statements are accurate, ask the AI for its sources, and check those sources yourself. If a named person is quoted in the text, they should of course read and approve the quotation before publication or sharing.
2. Language check. AI‑generated texts tend to be overly effusive or ingratiating in tone. In addition to factual accuracy, you must therefore ensure that the tone of the news article aligns with KI’s brand and the context. The text should be engaging but also accurate, with a professional, neutral tone and clear, accessible language. As a rule, we avoid value‑laden words such as groundbreaking, unique, breakthrough and paradigm shift (if such terms are used, they fit better in quotations). Also check that the text sounds human, has correct Swedish sentence structure and vocabulary, and follows KI’s writing guidelines and general language rules.
3. Content check. Make sure the text has a good structure, with the most interesting information first. The headline and standfirst should reflect the rest of the text and highlight the most important points. You may need to add missing elements, such as funding, conflicts of interest, or publication details. Remove anything superfluous, such as repetitions, overly detailed methodological descriptions, or vague statements/quotations.

Before you publish the news article on ki.se

Add information about collaborations and funding 

All news articles about scientific articles published on ki.se should end with information about collaboration, funding, and possible conflicts of interest. Since it can be difficult to fit both the prompt and the entire news submission form in the chat box in Copilot, it might be easier if you add this type of information to the text yourself after the AI tool has done its job. You can find this information in the news submission form or the scientific article. If there are a lot of funders, you can select the most important ones, and if there are a lot of partners, you can simply write the number of partners and the countries where they are located. 

Or you can write a follow-up prompt asking Copilot to find this information in the provided documentation and help you write a sentence or two to add to your news article. 

Add the publication details

As mentioned above, Copilot tends to add both links and references in its answers/texts. But we don't want it to look like that on ki.se. To ensure that it is correct, it is better that you add the publication details yourself at the bottom of the news item. Below is an example of how we usually write them in research news on ki.se.