@inproceedings{xu-etal-2025-llms-identify,
title = "Can {LLM}s Identify Critical Limitations within Scientific Research? A Systematic Evaluation on {AI} Research Papers",
author = "Xu, Zhijian and
Zhao, Yilun and
Patwardhan, Manasi and
Vig, Lovekesh and
Cohan, Arman",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1009/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1009",
pages = "20652--20706",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "Peer review is fundamental to scientific research, but the growing volume of publications has intensified the challenges of this expertise-intensive process. While LLMs show promise in various scientific tasks, their potential to assist with peer review, particularly in identifying paper limitations, remains understudied. We first present a comprehensive taxonomy of limitation types in scientific research, with a focus on AI. Guided by this taxonomy, for studying limitations, we present LimitGen, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capability to support early-stage feedback and complement human peer review. Our benchmark consists of two subsets: LimitGen-Syn, a synthetic dataset carefully created through controlled perturbations of high-quality papers, and LimitGen-Human, a collection of real human-written limitations. To improve the ability of LLM systems to identify limitations, we augment them with literature retrieval, which is essential for grounding identifying limitations in prior scientific findings. Our approach enhances the capabilities of LLM systems to generate limitations in research papers, enabling them to provide more concrete and constructive feedback."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Can LLMs Identify Critical Limitations within Scientific Research? A Systematic Evaluation on AI Research Papers
%A Xu, Zhijian
%A Zhao, Yilun
%A Patwardhan, Manasi
%A Vig, Lovekesh
%A Cohan, Arman
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F xu-etal-2025-llms-identify
%X Peer review is fundamental to scientific research, but the growing volume of publications has intensified the challenges of this expertise-intensive process. While LLMs show promise in various scientific tasks, their potential to assist with peer review, particularly in identifying paper limitations, remains understudied. We first present a comprehensive taxonomy of limitation types in scientific research, with a focus on AI. Guided by this taxonomy, for studying limitations, we present LimitGen, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ capability to support early-stage feedback and complement human peer review. Our benchmark consists of two subsets: LimitGen-Syn, a synthetic dataset carefully created through controlled perturbations of high-quality papers, and LimitGen-Human, a collection of real human-written limitations. To improve the ability of LLM systems to identify limitations, we augment them with literature retrieval, which is essential for grounding identifying limitations in prior scientific findings. Our approach enhances the capabilities of LLM systems to generate limitations in research papers, enabling them to provide more concrete and constructive feedback.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1009
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1009/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1009
%P 20652-20706
Markdown (Informal)
[Can LLMs Identify Critical Limitations within Scientific Research? A Systematic Evaluation on AI Research Papers](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1009/) (Xu et al., ACL 2025)
ACL