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Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of everyday academic life. While much attention has been paid to how students use AI in learning, far less is known about how faculty members engage with AI tools in their own research writing and publication practices. A new study by researchers from the HSE Institute of Education and the Academic Writing Centre offers rare insights into how university instructors are navigating this emerging terrain.

Around one in three doctoral students begin their studies without clear goals, while only around 10% of graduates successfully defend their dissertations on time. What factors have influenced this trend over the last decade? Researchers from the IOE Centre of Sociology of Higher Education conducted a study examining the motivations of PhD students across Russian universities.

In just two years, generative AI has traveled an astonishing path—from a clever novelty to a genuine game changer in higher education. As tools like ChatGPT exploded into academic life, scholars across the globe rushed to make sense of what this new technology means for universities, teaching, and knowledge itself. That urgent, fast-moving response is what an international team of scholars—Isak Frumin, Anton Vorochkov, Margarita Kiryushina, Daria Platonova, and Evgeniy Terentiev—set out to explore in their sweeping new study, Mapping the Generative AI Research in Higher Education: 2022–2024 Insights. Published in Higher Education Quarterly, the research analyzes more than 4,000 publications produced between 2022 and 2024. The result is a vivid, data-rich portrait of a field evolving at breakneck speed—revealing not only what researchers are studying, but how, where, and with what mix of excitement, concern, and uncertainty. What emerges is academia in full sprint, trying to keep pace with a technology that refuses to slow down.