Under the patronage of the Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Baghdad, Prof. Ghassan Hameed Abdul Majeed, the Computer Engineering Department organized an in-person workshop titled “AI Tool for Exploring Connected Papers.” The workshop was delivered by Assistant Professor Riyadh Basil Abduljabbar on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, in the department’s discussion hall, with the attendance of faculty members and a number of undergraduate and postgraduate students.
This workshop comes as part of the department’s efforts to support academic development and enhance students’ research skills by introducing the latest digital tools based on artificial intelligence technologies. These tools contribute to improving academic research methods and keeping pace with rapid advancements in scientific knowledge production.
The workshop focused on Connected Papers as a modern AI-based tool used to explore relationships between scientific studies, helping to simplify the research process amid the growing volume of academic publications.
It also highlighted key challenges faced by researchers using traditional methods, such as difficulty in identifying connections between studies, missing relevant sources due to variations in terminology, and limitations in tracking the evolution of scientific ideas. The session explained how these challenges can be addressed through interactive maps based on conceptual similarity and citation networks.
Additionally, the workshop covered how the tool works, its user interface, and the role of graphical maps in visualizing relationships between research papers. It demonstrated how to use the tool for conducting literature reviews, identifying key publications, and discovering research gaps to enhance the quality of academic work.
The workshop emphasized the importance of using such tools alongside academic search platforms like Google Scholar, rather than relying solely on keywords, by adopting more comprehensive analytical approaches to understanding relationships between studies.
It concluded with several recommendations, including encouraging students to utilize AI tools in their research, graduation projects, and postgraduate studies, building literature maps before starting research, and developing skills in reading abstracts and systematically documenting sources.
