# From Verification Burden to Trusted Collaboration: Design Goals for LLM-Assisted Literature Reviews

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11661 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11661/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08845/) (2023)
- [SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14259/) (2023)
- [RankZephyr: Effective and Robust Zero-Shot Listwise Reranking is a Breeze!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02724/) (2023)
- [Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01268/) (2024)
- [LLMs as Research Tools: A Large Scale Survey of Researchers' Usage and Perceptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05025/) (2024)
- [Towards Scientific Discovery with Generative AI: Progress, Opportunities, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11427/) (2024)
- [Self-Prompting Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Open-Domain QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08635/) (2022)
- [Agent Instructs Large Language Models to be General Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03710/) (2023)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Literature Reviews: Opportunities and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08565/) (2024)
- [ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02574/) (2024)
- [Target-aware Abstractive Related Work Generation with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13339/) (2022)
- [The Howard-Harvard effect: Institutional reproduction of intersectional inequalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04391/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [More Than Can Be Said: A Benchmark and Framework for Pre-Question Scientific Ideation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06345/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in academic writing practices. Although numerous studies have explored how researchers employ these tools for scientific writing, their concrete implementation, limitations, and design challenges within the literature review process remain underexplored. In this paper, we report a user study with researchers across multiple disciplines to characterize current practices, benefits, and textitpain points in using LLMs to investigate related work. We identified three recurring gaps: (i) lack of trust in outputs, (ii) persistent verification burden, and (iii) requiring multiple tools. This motivates our proposal of six design goals and a high-level framework that operationalizes them through improved related papers visualization, verification at every step, and human-feedback alignment with generation-guided explanations. Overall, by grounding our work in the practical, day-to-day needs of researchers, we designed a framework that addresses these limitations and models real-world LLM-assisted writing, advancing trust through verifiable actions and fostering practical collaboration between researchers and AI systems.