The paper investigates how large language models can extract contextualized data from scientific literature. It presents four workflows: expert‑written prompts, self‑generated prompts, autonomous literature discovery, and dataset creation from guidelines. While models perform well with prompts, they struggle with context, hallucinate references, and still need human oversight for final validation.
By Valentin Romanov, Monique Bax, Steven Niederer
The paper evaluates browser-based large language models (LLMs) for extracting detailed, contextualized data from scientific papers. It presents four workflows: (1) expert-curated prompts yield good extraction but struggle with nuance; (2) LLMs can generate effective prompts from simple instructions; (3) autonomous literature discovery is challenging, with missing or hallucinated references; (4) LLMs can build new datasets from guidelines that align closely with human experts, yet still need human oversight. The study outlines a practical, auditable workflow where experts set standards, models cross-check extractions, and researchers resolve disputes, enabling scalable scientific data curation.
The study evaluates literature reviews produced by large language models (LLMs) using short and long context windows, assessing their quality across 15 dimensions. Results show that while larger context windows allow LLMs to incorporate more information and maintain coherence, they also increase repetition, omission of key works, and a tendency toward descriptive rather than synthetic content. Human oversight remains essential for meeting academic publishing standards, and the authors suggest future work should blend human expertise with AI to mitigate these limitations.
By Muhammad Ali Chaudhry, Xinyuan Hao, Haifa Alwahaby
arXiv:2608.21374v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Literature reviews are essential to scientific progress, but rigorously evaluating automatically generated reviews remains difficult because many aspec...
By Ruotong Zhao, Zhiyu Chen, Xurui Liu, Haidong Xue, Dong Liang, Jigao Fu, Wu YanBiao, Yuanyi Zhen, Fengli Xu, Yong Li
SciLitBench is a multi-stage benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in systematic literature reviews, covering title and abstract screening, full-text screening, and schema-guided data extraction across 42,981 records and 888 included papers. The study shows that explicit inclusion/exclusion criteria boost title and abstract screening performance by 28.8% and researcher-authored rationales improve full-text screening by 15%. Data extraction performance varies widely, with high accuracy for publication year but low overlap for computational approaches, and even the best models recover only a fraction of annotated evidence and limitations.
By Miguel Zabaleta, Baihan Lin
arXiv:2607. 28631v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI Scientist systems capable of autonomous research have the potential to significantly accelerate scientific discovery.
By Vaibhava Lakshmi Ravideshik, Mayank Kejriwal
arXiv:2608. 11415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are being proposed as agents in scientific workflows, in domains where no downstream verifier exists.
By Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov
IdeaTaste is a benchmark that evaluates large language models (LLMs) on their ability to generate research proposals that align with what human researchers actually publish. The study compares proposals generated by six contemporary LLMs against real papers from four research areas, finding that LLMs achieve only about 26% of the citation matching and 18% of the idea matching of human communities. Even larger LLM populations and richer field contexts do not close this gap, indicating that LLMs struggle more with translating research directions into concrete approaches than with selecting the right topics.
By Shanshan Zhong, Chen Xu, Jingjie Ning, Zhengzhong Liu, Aviral Kumar, Chenyan Xiong
arXiv:2606. 31651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent automated research systems show that language-model agents can generate hypotheses, run experiments, and write complete manuscripts, but most evidence still comes from selected examples, human-framed topics, or a few pre-defined research tasks.
By Qiong Tang, Xiangkun Hu, Xiangyang Liu, Yiran Chen, Yunfan Shao
arXiv:2608.28596v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly embedded in scientific workflows for literature analysis, drafting, and review. Existing systems adv...
By Nidhi Jha, Siddharth Chaudhary, Ajinkya Kulkarni
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to assist writing, but this study shows they alter both tone and meaning of human text. A user study found that heavy LLM use increased neutral essays by nearly 70% and made writers feel less creative and less in their voice. Even when prompted to make only grammar edits, LLMs changed the semantic content of essays and produced AI-generated scientific reviews that were less focused on clarity and significance and scored higher on average.
By Marwa Abdulhai, Isadora White, Yanming Wan, Ibrahim Qureshi, Joel Z. Leibo, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Natasha Jaques
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably assess scientific hypotheses by using a logit-based energy scoring method that leverages the model’s intrinsic confidence. Across 1,323 papers in 12 disciplines, this intrinsic scoring achieved a 33.0% Hit@1 rate, outperforming a prompted listwise ranking approach that scored 16.6%. The best result, a 1‑billion‑parameter model with logit-based energy scoring, reached 53.1% Hit@1, suggesting that confidence‑based evaluation could improve trustworthy AI‑enabled scientific discovery.
By Swati Rajwal, Sanjay Das, Tirthankar Ghosal