Digitalization has firmly entered into all spheres of life of the individual, society and the state. Such a specific area as the training of highly qualified personnel was no exception. And it's not just about digitalizing accounting procedures and document management, which is certainly important. Acute problems arise, first of all, in the process of preparing a dissertation research, when applicants consciously (or unconsciously) use digital tools to varying degrees. The latter includes a fairly extensive and diverse set: starting from the use of the Electronic Catalog of the Russian State Library (RSL) and ending with the writing of key fragments of the dissertation text using the AI text generation function. In this regard, it is worth emphasizing that the «vast expanses of the Internet» are saturated with intrusive advertising of various neural networks that are offered to young applicants as reliable tools for writing scientific papers, including dissertations. This publication is intended to address a specifics of the preparation of dissertation research by applicants for academic degrees in the context of digitalization. Special emphasis will be placed on the key points associated with the risks of not only uncritical perception and integration of information received from the neural network into the text of the dissertation, but, first of all, with the consequences of the rejection of a certain part of graduate students from time-tested, «traditional» methods of searching for scientific sources and other information for analysis and use in dissertation work. Special attention will be paid to practical recommendations addressed not only to aspiring young scientists, but also to their scientific supervisors.
digitalization, postgraduate studies, postgraduate student, supervisor, dissertation, gadgets, neural network, AI, libraries.