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honest-scholar helps you use AI in research honestly: you (not the AI) make and sign off every material decision, you can defend the work, and evidence is provenance-tracked. This page is how you tell your readers that — a short, truthful AI-use disclosure you can put in a paper, plus how to cite the tool. This is also, deliberately, how Honest Scholar spreads: a disclosure that helps you (venues increasingly require an AI-use statement) and, because it names the protocol you followed, points other researchers to it. See ADR-0025.

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What it is not

  • Not a seal of honesty. Honest Scholar does not certify that your research is honest — it gives you a structured, truthful way to disclose what you and the AI each did, backed by your own recorded sign-offs. Readers judge; the statement just tells them what happened and links the record.
  • Not automatic or mandatory. The disclosure is proposed to you (see paper-synthesis); you review, edit, and decide whether to include it. It is yours, in your words.

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The AI-use disclosure (template)

Put this in a Use of AI / Acknowledgments / methods statement. paper-synthesis drafts it from your actual provenance record (who signed off which decisions, which run-refs back which results, what the AI drafted) — so it is evidence-based, not boilerplate. Edit freely.
Use of AI. This work was conducted with AI assistance under the Honest Scholar protocol (github.com/davorrunje/honest-scholar). Every material scientific decision — the hypotheses, whether results are real, what to publish, and all claims — was made and signed off by the named authors, who understand and can defend the work. AI tools were used for [literature search, bookkeeping and formatting, drafting] and not to generate conclusions or fabricate evidence; datasets and results are provenance-tracked. Decision record: [link / commit].
Keep it truthful: only claim what the record shows, and cut any line that isn’t true of your project.

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Citing Honest Scholar

For now, cite the repository (a CITATION.cff is included, so GitHub’s “Cite this repository” works):
Transition: a short report on Honest Scholar will be posted to arXiv and then submitted to a venue. When the preprint exists, CITATION.cff’s preferred-citation will point at it, and this BibTeX will be replaced by the arXiv (then published) reference. (Tracking: the “arXiv report” issue.)

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Optional: a repo badge

If you keep your research in a public repo, you can add a discovery badge (this describes the disclosure, it does not certify honesty):

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How it reaches you (the automatic step)

You should not have to remember this. When paper-synthesis finalizes a paper — after the publish decision is signed off — it proactively proposes the disclosure (drafted from your record) and the citation, for you to adopt or decline. That is the whole growth mechanism: useful to you, honest, and opt-in. See ADR-0025 and paper-synthesis.