Investigating Novice Researchers' Perceptions of Research Privacy Within LLM-Assisted Workflows
Identifies a critical privacy-publication trade-off for novice researchers using LLMs, highlighting gaps in institutional support and user misconceptions.
Novice researchers paradoxically increase reliance on public LLMs despite privacy fears, driven by publication pressure and misconceptions about data safety. Interviews with 44 researchers revealed that fear of idea leakage accelerates LLM use, and proposed mitigations like input fragmentation were seen as ineffective.
Large Language Model (LLMs)-assisted scholarly workflows introduce critical privacy and intellectual property risks. As a uniquely vulnerable cohort driven by publication pressure and a lack of institutional support, novice researchers rely heavily on public LLMs, compelling them to navigate high-stakes privacy-publication trade-offs. To investigate these concerns, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 44 researchers across diverse disciplines. Our findings reveal that the fear of idea leakage paradoxically accelerates, rather than deters, reliance on LLMs, as researchers utilize them to expedite publication. They also held misconceptions that their ideas lacked the unique value to attract targeted attacks, and that their inputs would be safely diluted within massive datasets, preventing reconstruction. From interviews, we identified five types of mitigations including input fragmentation and adversarial probing, though we found that participants largely perceived these measures as ineffective. We outline implications including implementing institution-level sandboxed isolation, scenario-based privacy pedagogy, and verifiable data-deletion audits for transparency.