How This Book Was Written

During my sabbatical in early 2025—between meetings with collaborators and traveling with my family across Asia—I decided to take a closer look at a set of tools that are beginning to affect how some parts of research and writing are done. I approached this the same way I approach any new method: with curiosity, skepticism, and a desire to understand both its potential and its limits—and, in particular, what still requires human judgment.

I started with small, concrete projects. One was a set of personalized travel books I made for my kids. Another was a simple experimental app that allowed other families to create similar books and have them printed. Through this process, I learned how different large language models behave, where they are useful, where they fail, and how they can be connected to other software systems through APIs. What mattered wasn’t the output itself, but the chance to observe these systems closely in low-stakes settings before applying them to scholarly work.

That experience clarified something. The thing holding this book back wasn’t a lack of ideas or motivation; it was the same bottleneck many researchers face: time. Writing a methods book requires outlining, searching and synthesizing literature, checking citations, revising drafts, and revisiting arguments again and again. These are familiar research tasks—but they are slow.

For this book, I did not rely on an off-the-shelf writing tool. Instead, I designed and built a custom, multi-step workflow—a multi-agent pipeline—that supported specific research tasks: generating and revising outlines, supporting literature searches and annotated bibliographies, validating citations, and facilitating iterative drafting and editing. Each component had a defined role, and none operated autonomously.

At every stage, I reviewed, edited, rejected, or rewrote what these tools produced. The system assisted with process, not judgment. Every claim, interpretation, and conclusion in this book is my own responsibility.

Why am I telling you this? Because this is a book about research methods. We are entering an era in which the mechanics of how knowledge is assembled are changing, even as the standards for good research—clarity, rigor, transparency, and accountability—remain the same. Rather than speculate about these tools from a distance, I wanted to understand them firsthand and use them in a way that aligns with the values I teach.

My hope is that the result is a book that is more comprehensive and carefully researched than I could have produced on my own, while still reflecting my voice, judgment, and perspective. The tools helped with the work; responsibility for that work remains with me.