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SurveyGen: Quality-Aware Scientific Survey Generation with Large Language Models

2025· article· W4416037063 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Tong Bao, Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Davood Rafiei, Chengzhi Zhang

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicSurvey Methodology and Nonresponse
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersAlliance de recherche numérique du CanadaNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaNational Natural Science Foundation of ChinaUniversity of Alberta
KeywordsNatural language generationNatural languageLanguage modelGovernment (linguistics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Automatic survey generation has emerged as a key task in scientific document processing.While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating survey texts, the lack of standardized evaluation datasets critically hampers rigorous assessment of their performance against human-written surveys.In this work, we present SurveyGen, a large-scale dataset comprising over 4,200 human-written surveys across diverse scientific domains, along with 242,143 cited references and extensive quality-related metadata for both the surveys and the cited papers.Leveraging this resource, we build QUAL-SG, a novel quality-aware framework for survey generation that enhances the standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline by incorporating quality-aware indicators into literature retrieval to assess and select higher-quality source papers.Using this dataset and framework, we systematically evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs under varying levels of human involvement-from fully automatic generation to human-guided writing.Experimental results and human evaluations show that while semi-automatic pipelines can achieve partially competitive outcomes, fully automatic survey generation still suffers from low citation quality and limited critical analysis 1 .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.014
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.068
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.014
Threshold uncertainty score0.075

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0140.068
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.002
Bibliometrics0.0060.004
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0030.003
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.009

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.391
GPT teacher head0.498
Teacher spread0.108 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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