Real-World Evaluation of an AI Agent Drafting Translational Impact Summaries
Mohammad Arvan, Amber E. Osterholt, Bailee Rue, Yuvaneswaren R. Sureshbabu, Krishna R. Patel, Rebecca T. Feinstein, Bethany C. Bray, Niranjan S. Karnik
AI 速览：在一个CTSA中心的真实影响力报告流程中，评估人机协同AI智能体为10位KL2/K12学者起草TSBM影响力摘要的可用性与效率。
Introduction. Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) programs must document their scholars' research impact, but assembling each scholar's record by hand takes staff an estimated 15 hours and does not scale to a full cohort. An artificial intelligence (AI) agent could serve as a tool to gather scholar data across platforms and disciplines. Methods. We built a human-in-the-loop AI agent that assembles a dossier of sourced evidence for each scholar and drafts one-sentence Translational Science Benefits Model (TSBM) impact summaries for staff review. We evaluated it in the impact-reporting workflow of one CTSA hub across 10 career-development (KL2/K12) scholars. Two evaluation staff independently coded all 507 findings as accept, edit, or reject; the primary measure was the unanimous usable rate, defined as the share both accepted or edited. Results. Both reviewers accepted or edited 81.7% of the agent's findings. Reviewers each spent a median of 14 minutes per scholar, replacing an estimated 15 hours of manual assembly. Inter-rater agreement was moderate (Cohen's kappa 0.43 on the usable-versus-reject decision). A profile discovery study found the agent's recall close to human search. The agent's impact evidence spanned all four TSBM domains, and about a third of the reviewed findings fell in non-scholarly categories that routine processes tend to miss. Reviewers rated synthesis accuracy 4.5 and usefulness 4.8 on a 5-point scale. Conclusions. A human-in-the-loop AI agent can serve as the first-pass author of a scholar's impact record, shifting staff from collecting and writing to reviewing, and making cohort-scale impact reporting feasible.
The Costs of Early-career Disciplinary Pivots: Evidence from Ph.D. Admissions
Sidney Xiang, Nicholas David, Dallas Card, Wenhao Sun, Daniel M Romero, Misha Teplitskiy
AI 速览：分析17万份博士申请发现，申请者从先前学位转向语义距离更远的目标项目时，录取概率更低，且入学后毕业更慢，但发表和引用表现无显著差异。
Science often advances when researchers pivot from one discipline to another and import new ideas. However, for established researchers, such pivots are associated with fewer publications and citations. Here, we investigate pivoting at the beginning of a research career--doctoral admissions--when the benefits of importing ideas might outweigh the switching costs. Analyzing 171,347 PhD applications at a large research university from 2013 to 2023, we measured the semantic distance between each applicant's prior degree and target program. Applicants who pivot further had lower undergraduate grades and, controlling for academic and demographic predictors, lower admission chances: the average pivot corresponds to a 5.3% lower admission probability (0.80 percentage points). Among enrollees, the average pivoter takes longer to graduate than non-pivoters, with a 10.7% lower graduation hazard, and similar publication and citation counts on average and at the tails. Our results suggest that pivoting at the outset of research careers, even if it benefits research communities, comes with significant costs to individuals.
The rapid growth of computer science (CS) papers increases the work needed to review research and find relevant studies. The growing use of AI tools in scientific writing makes it increasingly important to identify the authors behind this growth. Previous studies have tracked publication growth and followed researchers' careers, documenting the increasing number of authors and the many researchers who publish only briefly. However, annual averages of papers per author reflect different sets of researchers and may hide changes among the same authors. This study addresses this gap by linking individual changes to overall CS paper growth using arXiv, DBLP, and conference submission records for 2010-2025. With each paper divided equally among its authors, the total paper count equals the number of authors multiplied by their average papers per author. This relationship provides a decomposition of the two contributions of paper growth. This decomposition attributes nearly all growth in CS paper volume to an increase in the number of publishing authors. The analysis of author numbers further distinguishes expansion through new and returning arXiv authors from the replacement of authors no longer publishing there. Changes in who publishes also affect the average, motivating comparisons of the same authors over time within groups with similar past paper counts. This comparison identifies substantial replacement within the growing author group. New authors average fewer papers under this counting method, keeping the overall average nearly unchanged despite increases among authors who published in both years. Moreover, statistics show that these increases are uneven, with widening gaps even among authors who previously published similar numbers of papers. These findings provide insights into peer review, community participation, researcher evaluation, and equity within the CS community.
A research field records its open problems in surveys, keynotes and community reports. Those are prose, written every few years, and nobody can ask them who works on a problem now or whether it was settled last year. We argue the problems should be data, and we build the system that makes them so: a hand-curated problem layer carried in unchanged, under an evidence layer rebuilt from a bibliographic index, joined by typed, provenance-carrying links in one graph database and queryable from one language. A language model does four jobs -- per-paper extraction, catalog grounding, per-paper status verdict, and idea generation -- each constrained to a candidate set so out-of-set answers are refused rather than stored. We report a study on two curated catalogs, database research (1,053 problems) and AI research (1,000 problems), each with a prior catalog-only graph. The rebuilt graph answers every question the catalog-only graph answered -- 47 of 47 on databases, 34 of 35 on AI -- plus questions the catalog-only graph refused: recent workers, untouched problems, methods tried, and outside papers bearing on a problem (336 problems, 770 works on databases). The capability we most wanted does not survive its own audit. Of 41 solves and refutes verdicts hand-checked against the papers, 9 are correct, 30 partly correct and 2 wrong; no refutes verdict (0 of 34) disproves an open problem, and only 1 of 7 solves closes the central question. We report that failure in full and draw the design conclusion: a status change must be proposed with its evidence and never applied, making the human reviewer part of the architecture. We close with the data-engineering problems this raises: entity resolution across curated and harvested layers, verifying model status claims, freshness under source quotas, and evaluation without ground truth.
Jeremy Y. Ng, Henry Liu, Mehvish Masood, Niveen Syed, Dalia Zubashev, Michel Sabe, Marco Solmi, Dimity Stephen 等 27 位作者
Background: Despite the growth of bibliometric analyses, few studies offer guidance on how to report them, resulting in a lack of research transparency and completeness. To address this gap, we developed the Guidance List for the repOrting of Bibliometric AnaLyses (GLOBAL). Methods: An initial list of items for the GLOBAL was generated through a scoping review and refined through a modified two-round Delphi, as recommended by the EQUATOR Network. The guideline was finalized through a pilot test, where participants assessed their manuscripts using the checklist and Elaboration and Explanation (E&E) document, which outlines item expectations and provides examples. Results: The scoping review resulted in 32 items. In Round 1, 24 items reached consensus and thematic content analysis resulted in one additional item. This item, along with the eight items that did not reach consensus, were discussed in detail in Round 2. During the in-person meeting, one item was split into two, totalling ten voting items. Eight out of ten items reached consensus, five for inclusion and three for exclusion. Conclusions: The finalized 28-item GLOBAL (and its accompanying E&E document) provides users with a framework to report bibliometric analyses, aimed at promoting high-quality reporting of bibliometric analyses in scholarly literature.
Verifying numerical claims in research written by AI agents is an important but challenging problem. Recent benchmarks show that many agent-written papers fail integrity checks, but such verdicts, often produced by a single LLM judge, identify failure without explaining its nature, and existing checks either test a paper for internal consistency or test whether a reported value appears somewhere in an agent's output. We re-analyze all 540 released judgments from a recent public benchmark of AI research agents (nine agents, fifteen open research problems) and manually label 256 numerical claims from 18 submissions. Failures concentrate on alignment between the paper and the underlying work rather than overt cheating, and about four in five unsupported claims correspond to values in the agent's own files that come from the wrong experiment, metric, or run. We introduce a deterministic claim-to-evidence checker that scores whether the surrounding context identifies the claimed result and calibrates each claim against numerical decoys. With its rules fixed before labeling, it certifies claims with over 90% precision against blinded annotators (78 of 85; Cohen's kappa = 0.89), while verifying only a subset of claims; most claims it cannot verify are nevertheless traceable, so failure to verify is not evidence of falsehood. An LLM verifier given the same evidence recovers more traceable claims but accepts about three times as many misattributed ones, so the two are best used together. Applied to 99 submissions, the checker reveals large differences in traceability across agents, and a second judge from a different vendor preserves the official agent ranking while passing twice as many papers. These findings motivate provenance-first auditing of AI-produced research.
Michal Orzechowski, Lukasz Opiola, Ignacio Lamata Martinez, Marinos Ioannides, Panayiotis N. Panayiotou, Lukasz Dutka, Renata G. Slota, Jacek Kitowski
The complexity of high-quality 3D digitised cultural heritage objects creates challenges for existing data management systems as they need to develop metadata management and processing capabilities to provide semantic insight into the interconnectivity of data that constitutes cultural heritage objects. To address these challenges, we propose a global federated authentication and authorisation mechanism, a data and metadata management system, and an integrated engine for designing and executing automated workflows that facilitate the processing of both data and metadata. The solution is evaluated with three distinct 3D digitised cultural objects and presents the complete process from data upload to cultural heritage object publication
The written paper has long stood in as proof of work: a fluent, well-structured manuscript was taken as evidence that good research lay behind it. Generative AI has broken that link. Polished manuscripts now cost nothing to produce, submissions are outgrowing what reviewers can absorb, and venues are turning to AI for help. The logical endpoint is a loop where AI writes the papers and AI reviews them. We argue that this loop is survivable, but only if it is given a reward function, and that human reviewing effort should become that reward function. We propose that submissions should consist of a 1500-word brief plus an unlimited, machine-verifiable appendix. Human reviewers judge whether a pursuit is worthwhile, models verify the experimental record in the appendix, and human curation decides where the field goes next.
Modern science has moved decisively toward larger and more collaborative research teams. Yet an influential 2019 study reported that small teams are more disruptive than large teams, a conclusion difficult to reconcile with both the well-known trend toward increasing collaboration and the disproportionately large teams behind widely recognized disruptive research, such as work that has been awarded Nobel Prizes. Here we show that the reported disruptive advantage of small teams is largely an artifact of measurement rather than a fact about teams. Analyzing about 60 million scientific publications, we find that larger teams cite more references and that the standard disruption index declines mechanically as reference lists lengthen. Equalizing reference-count distributions across team sizes reverses the negative gradient within the index's own framework. Evaluating each paper against one reference at a time yields a reference-robust measure that distinguishes recognized breakthroughs from ordinary papers more sharply and more consistently than the standard disruption index across six independently curated benchmarks, including the Nobel Prize. Under this validated measurement, scientific disruption increases with team size across four scientific domains and in every decade from the 1970s to the 2010s. For scientific publications, we conclude that larger teams are more, not less, disruptive.
Rahi Navelkar, Andrea Cosolo, Iago Maceda Porto, Bogdan Bintu, Yubao Cheng, Vincent Gardeux, Silvia Gutnik, Taihei Fujimori 等 40 位作者
In recent years, multiplexed Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH) or FISH-omics methods have rapidly expanded, enabling the quantification of chromatin organization in single cells, often in conjunction with measurements of RNAs and proteins. These approaches have deepened our understanding of how 3D chromosome architecture relates to transcriptional activity and cell states in health and disease. Despite these advances, results from Chromatin Tracing FISH-omics experiments remain challenging to share, reuse, and analyze due to the absence of standardized data exchange specifications. Building on the release of microscopy metadata standards, we introduce the FISH Omics Format-Chromatin Tracing (FOF-CT), a community-developed standard for processed results from diverse imaging modalities. We describe the FOF-CT file format and present a curated collection of datasets deposited in the 4D Nucleome Data Portal and the OME Image Data Resource (IDR). We also highlight their potential for reuse, integration, and modeling by outlining example analysis pipelines and illustrating biological insights enabled by standardized, FAIR-compliant Chromatin Tracing datasets. FOF-CT natively represents both ball-and-stick and volumetric Chromatin Tracing data, unifying the two modalities within a single, modular table-based architecture (FOF-bas-CT and FOF-vol-CT, respectively).
Janusch Vajna-Jehle, Kilian Gerberding, Daniel Lusk, Teja Kattenborn, Julia Sophie Gäßler, Anna Göritz, Luis Kremer, Charlotte Lange 等 278 位作者
From individual trees to forest stands, three-dimensional structure shapes carbon, water, and energy flows, habitat conditions, and resource availability. Yet tree and forest structural attributes remain difficult to assess consistently across space and time. Close-range LiDAR (light detection and ranging) records detailed 3D structure from branches and trees to forest plots, including trees outside forests. However, broader reuse is constrained when data, acquisition context, processing, computation, and access conditions are maintained separately. We present 3Dtrees.earth, an operational community research infrastructure that brings close-range LiDAR datasets, analysis tools, and computing resources together while linking original observations to their metadata and processing outputs. As of 23 October 2026, the platform comprised 2,760 datasets, including 2,481 publicly visible datasets. These point cloud datasets span 46 countries on all six inhabited continents and include terrestrial, mobile, and uncrewed aerial laser scanning. Users can contribute and discover datasets, run standardized processing workflows on shared computing infrastructure, inspect point clouds and model predictions in the browser, and access data and processing outputs together with citation information. Workflows combine rule-based and machine-learning methods, with tools updated as methods advance. Outputs include raster products, individual-tree and semantic segmentation, and tree- and stand-level metrics. Original point clouds and processing records are retained, enabling reprocessing with improved tools while preserving provenance. With broader coverage, curation, and validation, this shared resource could extend individual surveys into a basis for model evaluation and benchmarking, cross-site synthesis, calibration and validation of larger-scale Earth observation products, and macroecological analysis.
Scientific output is growing rapidly, but it is unclear whether the expanding literature remains original or is increasingly repeating itself. Originality has many dimensions. One dimension can now be measured directly: how textually distinct a paper is from the work that came before it. Using semantic language models, we screened more than 26,000 full-text papers across eight fields in the CORE database (2015--2025) for passages resembling recent literature. We compared every paper against a fixed-size sample of earlier work, so increases in resemblance are not a by-product of literature growth. We find that the share of a paper's text resembling recent work was stable before 2021, then rose sharply, more than tripling by 2025. The increase came not from a few papers borrowing more heavily but from resemblance spreading across the literature: more papers now contain passages that echo recent work, and almost none of this growth is explained by cited work. We also found an analogous increase in passages expressing the same scientific idea. The pattern held across robustness checks and replicated in a second, independent database. Along this one measurable axis of originality, scientific writing has become less distinct from the work preceding it.
Adolphe J. Bequet, Sebastien Laurent, Baptiste Bouvier
LitUbik is an open-source, self-hosted tool for conducting systematic reviews, from the registered protocol to the PRISMA 2020 diagram. LitUbik covers calibrated search equations, automated searching, deduplication, blinded multi-reviewer screening, full-text retrieval, snowballing, appraisal, extraction and reporting, on one server or across disconnected instances. At each stage, optional AI assistance from commercial or local language models offers proposals that a named reviewer accepts or rejects. Every AI call is logged, so the AI-use disclosure is written from a record. A systematic review of 31 papers on review tools, conducted in LitUbik, compares it with existing tools and illustrates its use. LitUbik is distributed under AGPLv3.
U.S. Library and Information Science (LIS) schools are organized differently: some are independent, and others share a parent unit with computing, communication, education, or the arts and sciences. We ask whether their research differs accordingly, using 18,048 publications (2013--2026) by 1,602 faculty members at 44 ALA-accredited schools. We grouped the 15,934 publications with abstracts into 15 research themes with document embeddings and hierarchical clustering, and classified venues by field. Faculty members' research profiles differ by school type in themes and, more clearly, in venues, but type accounts for only 2.2% and 5.3% of the variation; most lies among faculty of the same school. The differences run from libraries and archives to computational research. Schools housed with computing spread over the most themes and publish most on security, networks, and urban computing, on clinical and biomedical informatics, and in computer science venues; schools housed with education spread over the fewest and concentrate most on libraries, archives, and computing education; independent schools stay closest to the average. Over the period, schools moved away from library research and LIS venues, but seldom toward the venues of their parent unit's discipline. Research appears to follow a school's faculty more than its parent unit.
Software is crucial for the advancement of science, especially in the context of rapidly growing datasets that increasingly require algorithm and pipeline development to process data and produce results. However, software has not always been consistently cited, despite the importance of citations in strengthening support for software development. To encourage, streamline, and standardize the process of citing software in academic works, we introduce 'The Software Citation Station': a publicly available website and tool to quickly find correct software citation statements and add them to publications.
Hardware-accelerated reinforcement learning in JAX has gained rapid popularity in recent years and has proven to be a successful method of scaling online reinforcement learning. The resulting ecosystem, however, is fragmented: environment suites define their own interfaces, and algorithm implementations are typically written for a single suite, a single type of space, and either JAX-native or host-based environments. Here we present Jaxnasium, a library for JAX-based reinforcement learning, aiming to make the field more accessible. Jaxnasium represents observation and action spaces as PyTrees, and uses this structure to build networks and support multi-agent processing. Through this, its near-single-file implementations run on discrete, continuous, image, and composite spaces, as well as in multi-agent environments, without any changes to the algorithm code. The same files serve as readable, research-friendly algorithms, as well as importable algorithms for more applied workloads. Through a minimal Gymnasium-style interface and wrappers for 11 suites, over 300 environments are available on which a small PPO implementation with default hyperparameters is able to run. Additionally, through a simple wrapper, we can run Gymnasium and EnvPool environments with the same algorithm and training loop, with no performance loss compared to architectures specifically built for training JAX algorithms on host-based environments. Jaxnasium further provides tools for multi-seed evaluation, hyperparameter sweeps, and project scaffolding. Jaxnasium is open-sourced at https://github.com/ponseko/jaxnasium
Large language model (LLM) scores are being studied as information for scholarly evaluation. Interpreting these scores requires evidence about agreement with human judgments and its variation across evaluation conditions. Guided by an argument-based approach to validation, we compare four LLMs on 7,083 public ICLR 2024 submissions under a standard review condition and examine ten prompt conditions using DeepSeek-V3.2. We distinguish average score divergence, paper-level absolute error, and rank correlation, then examine domain differences and adjusted manuscript-feature associations. For DeepSeek-V3.2, Area Chair guidance reduces mean rating divergence from 1.460 to 0.199 points and mean absolute error from 1.577 to 0.942, while rank correlation changes from 0.377 to 0.387. Historical references combined with downward scoring instructions yield mean divergence of 0.052 and rank correlation of 0.321. Domain differences remain after global calibration. Longer titles have positive adjusted associations with rating divergence, and formula density has negative associations across all four configurations. These findings connect score interpretation to the scoring procedure, evaluation context, and manuscript information represented in the comparison. They show why aggregate alignment, manuscript ordering, and correspondence within manuscript groups require distinct evidence when evaluating LLM-generated scholarly assessment information.
In 2023, a New York judge sanctioned two attorneys in \emph{Mata v. Avianca} for filing a brief containing hallucinated citations generated by ChatGPT. These failures can be largely caught by database lookups. The harder problem is detecting citations that point to real cases but do not support the propositions for which they are offered, a failure mode that existing evaluations of LLMs for legal use cases largely overlook. In this paper, we study proposition-level citation support verification through controlled perturbations of real legal citations obtained from two legal corpora. We either replace the cited case or change only the pinpoint page within the same case. Our evaluation of fourteen model configurations on the resulting examples shows that models catch $93$--$100\%$ of wrong-case corruptions, but they only catch $37$--$61\%$ of wrong-pinpoint corruptions on court opinions and $52$--$83\%$ on legal briefs. When models fail to catch wrong-pinpoint corruptions, they accept the citation based on topical overlap rather than page-level support. Larger-scale models and extended reasoning narrow the gap but do not close it: GPT-5.4 with high reasoning effort still misses $40\%$ of pinpoint mismatches on court opinions and $18\%$ on briefs. Prompting the model to verify support at the cited page improves recall, but it also raises the false positive rate. These results show that citation misrepresentations remain difficult to detect automatically. Recognizing the right legal topic and verifying support for the cited proposition are distinct capabilities, and current models conflate them.
As an experiment in agentic assisted analysis, we used an agentic AI model to analyse the effect of agentic AI on arXiv submissions; data acquisition, analysis and the first draft were carried out by the model under the author's direction. Monthly arXiv submissions have grown exponentially for three decades, at about $9\%$ per year. Fitting a piecewise log-linear trend with seasonal modulation to the full record, we find two post-pandemic breaks in growth rate. The first, in mid-2022, precedes ChatGPT and is carried by the expansion of AI research within computer science (CS); outside CS, growth from 2022 to 2025 remained at $8\%$ per year. The second, between December 2025 and February 2026, follows the release of models capable of extended autonomous work and is absent from the AI categories themselves. Since December 2025 submissions without a CS listing have run $17\%$ above trend, and in September 2026 total submissions reached a record $40\,363$. The excess is largest in mathematics, where submissions doubled within a year, and follows a gradient from formal and theoretical fields to experimental ones that is not ordered by surveyed rates of AI-tool adoption. In mathematics the increase is distributed across subfields and authors, two-thirds of it arising from a larger number of distinct authors rather than from a few prolific submitters. Across fields the clearest signature is a shift to single authorship: solo-authored papers rose by $70\%$ within a year in mathematics and condensed matter, and by $44\%$ in quantitative biology even as its total output fell, but not in experimental particle physics. The analysis is deliberately agnostic of LLM-detection methods: it uses only submission counts and metadata, with treatment timing fixed by calendar dates, and is therefore free of the outcome-triggered timing bias of author-level studies.
Recently, we have often observed hallucinated citations or references that do not correspond to any existing work in papers under review, preprints, or published papers. Such hallucinated citations pose a serious concern to scientific reliability. When they appear in accepted papers, they may also negatively affect the credibility of conferences. In this study, we refer to hallucinated citations as "HalluCitation" and systematically investigate their prevalence and impact. We analyze all papers published at ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP in 2024 and 2025, including main conference, Findings, and workshop papers. Our analysis reveals that nearly 300 papers contain at least one HalluCitation, most of which were published in 2025. Notably, half of these papers were identified at EMNLP 2025, the most recent conference, indicating that this issue is rapidly increasing. Moreover, more than 100 such papers were accepted as main conference and Findings papers at EMNLP 2025, affecting the credibility.
AI scientist systems, capable of autonomously executing the full research workflow from hypothesis generation and experimentation to paper writing, hold significant potential for accelerating scientific discovery. However, the internal workflow of these systems have not been closely examined. This lack of scrutiny poses a risk of introducing flaws that could undermine the integrity, reliability, and trustworthiness of their research outputs. In this paper, we identify four potential failure modes in contemporary AI scientist systems: inappropriate benchmark selection, data leakage, metric misuse, and post-hoc selection bias. To examine these risks, we design controlled experiments that isolate each failure mode while addressing challenges unique to evaluating AI scientist systems. Our assessment of two prominent open-source AI scientist systems reveals the presence of several failures, across a spectrum of severity, which can be easily overlooked in practice. Finally, we demonstrate that access to trace logs and code from the full automated workflow enables far more effective detection of such failures than examining the final paper alone. We thus recommend journals and conferences evaluating AI-generated research to mandate submission of these artifacts alongside the paper to ensure transparency, accountability, and reproducibility.