Reviewing Scientific Papers for Critical Problems With Reasoning LLMs: Baseline Approaches and Automatic Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Tianmai M., Abernethy, Neil F.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Tianmai M.
Abernethy, Neil F.
author_facet Zhang, Tianmai M.
Abernethy, Neil F.
contents Recent advancements in large language models have sparked interest in utilizing them to aid the peer review process of scientific publication amid the peer review crisis. However, having AI models generate full reviews in the same way as human reviewers risks exacerbating the irresponsible use of LLM-generated reviews and instigating intentional manipulation. As an alternative, we propose adopting LLMs as manuscript quality checkers. We introduce several baseline approaches and an extendable automatic evaluation framework using top reasoning LLMs as judges to tackle the difficulty of recruiting domain experts for manual evaluation. Utilizing papers withdrawn from arXiv, we validated our proposed methods with several leading reasoning LLMs available in May-June 2025 and assessed their performance and API costs for identifying critical errors and unsoundness problems in scientific papers. o3 exhibited the best problem identification performance among all models at a modest cost. This paper provides insights into document-based scientific understanding/reasoning and lays a foundation for future applications. Our dataset, code, and model outputs are publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23824
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reviewing Scientific Papers for Critical Problems With Reasoning LLMs: Baseline Approaches and Automatic Evaluation
Zhang, Tianmai M.
Abernethy, Neil F.
Computation and Language
Recent advancements in large language models have sparked interest in utilizing them to aid the peer review process of scientific publication amid the peer review crisis. However, having AI models generate full reviews in the same way as human reviewers risks exacerbating the irresponsible use of LLM-generated reviews and instigating intentional manipulation. As an alternative, we propose adopting LLMs as manuscript quality checkers. We introduce several baseline approaches and an extendable automatic evaluation framework using top reasoning LLMs as judges to tackle the difficulty of recruiting domain experts for manual evaluation. Utilizing papers withdrawn from arXiv, we validated our proposed methods with several leading reasoning LLMs available in May-June 2025 and assessed their performance and API costs for identifying critical errors and unsoundness problems in scientific papers. o3 exhibited the best problem identification performance among all models at a modest cost. This paper provides insights into document-based scientific understanding/reasoning and lays a foundation for future applications. Our dataset, code, and model outputs are publicly available.
title Reviewing Scientific Papers for Critical Problems With Reasoning LLMs: Baseline Approaches and Automatic Evaluation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23824