# SurveyX: Academic Survey Automation via Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14776 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14776/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [A Survey on RAG Meeting LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06211/) (2024)
- [Long-context LLMs Struggle with Long In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02060/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19736/) (2023)
- [RA-DIT: Retrieval-Augmented Dual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01352/) (2023)
- [Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14207/) (2024)
- [UPRISE: Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving Zero-Shot Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08518/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Preference Gap between Retrievers and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06954/) (2024)
- [Entity Cloze By Date: What LMs Know About Unseen Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02832/) (2022)
- [EtriCA: Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation Augmented by Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12463/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Dynamic Graph Knowledge Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16195/) (2023)
- [IAG: Induction-Augmented Generation Framework for Answering Reasoning Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18397/) (2023)
- [Improving Biomedical Abstractive Summarisation with Knowledge Aggregation from Citation Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15684/) (2023)
- [A Cross-Attention Augmented Model for Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11271/) (2023)
- [Train & Constrain: Phonologically Informed Tongue-Twister Generation from Topics and Paraphrases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13901/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19678/) (2025)
- [LLM-based Agentic Reasoning Frameworks: A Survey from Methods to Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17692/) (2025)
- [A Vision for Auto Research with LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18765/) (2025)
- [SurGE: A Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for Scientific Survey Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15658/) (2025)
- [How Far Are AI Scientists from Changing the World?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23276/) (2025)
- [InteractiveSurvey: An LLM-based Personalized and Interactive Survey Paper Generation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08762/) (2025)
- [AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18661/) (2026)
- [LLLMs: A Data-Driven Survey of Evolving Research on Limitations of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19240/) (2025)
- [Evolving Roles of LLMs in Scientific Innovation: Assistant, Collaborator, Scientist, and Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11810/) (2025)
- [Autonomous Research Agents: A Survey of AI Scientists and the Verification Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05179/) (2026)
- [InnoEval: On Research Idea Evaluation as a Knowledge-Grounded, Multi-Perspective Reasoning Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14367/) (2026)
- [Deep Literature Survey Automation with an Iterative Workflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21900/) (2025)
- [MotivGraph-SoIQ: Integrating Motivational Knowledge Graphs and Socratic Dialogue for Enhanced LLM Ideation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21978/) (2025)
- [SurveyBench: Can LLM(-Agents) Write Academic Surveys that Align with Reader Needs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03120/) (2025)
- [A Human-AI Collaborative Workflow for Mathematical Discovery: A Case Study in Grover-Compatible Riemannian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09443/) (2025)
- [SGSimEval: A Comprehensive Multifaceted and Similarity-Enhanced Benchmark for Automatic Survey Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11310/) (2025)
- [ARISE: Agentic Rubric-Guided Iterative Survey Engine for Automated Scholarly Paper Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17689/) (2025)
- [HiSciBench: A Hierarchical Multi-disciplinary Benchmark for Scientific Intelligence from Reading to Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22899/) (2025)
- [Agentic-Ideation: Sample Efficient Agentic Trajectories Synthesis for Scientific Ideation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31229/) (2026)
- [ResearchPulse: Building Method-Experiment Chains through Multi-Document Scientific Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03565/) (2025)
- [Agentic AI-Empowered Dynamic Survey Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04071/) (2026)
- [SciAtlas: A Computable Atlas of Science for Knowledge-Grounded AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22878/) (2026)
- [DeepSurvey: Agent-Oriented Automated Survey Generation with Analytical Depth and Citation Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29522/) (2026)
- [Meow: End-to-End Outline Writing for Automatic Academic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19370/) (2025)
- [Multi-Dimensional Knowledge Profiling with Large-Scale Literature Database and Hierarchical Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15170/) (2026)
- [Story2Proposal: A Scaffold for Structured Scientific Paper Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27065/) (2026)
- [Deep Academic Survey: Stateful Agentic Closed-Loop Paradigm for Academic Survey Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18034/) (2026)
- [LitReview Arena: Evaluating Literature Review Agents with Battle-Style Peer Review Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21374/) (2026)
- [Towards Automatic Evolution Tree Generation from Citation Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09561/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional comprehension capabilities and a vast knowledge base, suggesting that LLMs can serve as efficient tools for automated survey generation. However, recent research related to automated survey generation remains constrained by some critical limitations like finite context window, lack of in-depth content discussion, and absence of systematic evaluation frameworks. Inspired by human writing processes, we propose SurveyX, an efficient and organized system for automated survey generation that decomposes the survey composing process into two phases: the Preparation and Generation phases. By innovatively introducing online reference retrieval, a pre-processing method called AttributeTree, and a re-polishing process, SurveyX significantly enhances the efficacy of survey composition. Experimental evaluation results show that SurveyX outperforms existing automated survey generation systems in content quality (0.259 improvement) and citation quality (1.76 enhancement), approaching human expert performance across multiple evaluation dimensions. Examples of surveys generated by SurveyX are available on www.surveyx.cn