# Can Generative AI Automate Data Extraction for Meta-Analysis? A Case Study on Intercropping Research

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35089/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

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- [AgentAsk: Multi-Agent Systems Need to Ask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07593/) (2025)
- [AutoSynthesis: An agentic system for automated meta-analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15247/) (2026)
- [Do Multi-Agents Solve Better Than Single? Evaluating Agentic Frameworks for Diagram-Grounded Geometry Problem Solving and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16698/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Meta-analysis is the synthesis of information from multiple sources to arrive at an overarching conclusion. There is a large need for meta-analysis in agricultural research to synthesize what is known and analyze overarching patterns. Extracting data from published literature is, however, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and tedious, and is impeded by a lack of standardization in research design, units of measurement, and terminology. These challenges are particularly evident in the domain of crop species mixtures, also called intercropping. With the growing capabilities of LLMs, many recent attempts have focused on building systems and tools to automate data collection, yet rigorous assessment against human-labeled ground truth is often missing. In this research, we evaluate three LLM-based approaches---direct zero-shot prompting, a staged workflow, and a multi-agent system---with six open-weight models to extract data from the intercropping literature. The results are evaluated against the manually curated ground truth and through a downstream statistical analysis. Overall, direct zero-shot prompting is the strongest and most consistent approach, achieving the highest mean similarity-adjusted F1 of 0.577, although none of the approaches is close to fully accurate. In the downstream analysis, most model--approach combinations recover the direction of the relationship between the predictor and outcome variables, but do not estimate its magnitude accurately.