Prompt engineering

The practice of designing, refining, and structuring input text given to a generative AI system in order to elicit specific desired outputs, including techniques such as role assignment, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought scaffolding, and output-format specification.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

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For reproducibility in scholarly work, prompts that produced reported AI outputs should be archived alongside outputs. Prompt engineering is itself a human intellectual contribution that may merit acknowledgement when central to a result, but does not by itself confer authorship of AI-generated text.

References

Wei et al. 2022 ‘Chain-of-Thought Prompting’ NeurIPS
OpenAI Prompt Engineering Guide

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JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Prompt engineering"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/prompt-engineering" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/prompt-engineering",
  "name": "Prompt engineering",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/prompt-engineering",
  "description": "The practice of designing, refining, and structuring input text given to a generative AI system in order to elicit specific desired outputs, including techniques such as role assignment, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought scaffolding, and output-format specification.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/genai-disclosure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/prompt-engineering",
  "sameAs": [
    "Prompt design",
    "Prompting"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T01:54:45",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Prompt engineering

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Worked examples

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References

Use in your systems