# How Is Automated Research Evaluated? A Survey of Benchmarks and Evaluation Practices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11877 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11877/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07095/) (2024)
- [Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researchers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04109/) (2024)
- [ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05080/) (2024)
- [SciCode: A Research Coding Benchmark Curated by Scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13168/) (2024)
- [RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15114/) (2024)
- [AutoSurvey: Large Language Models Can Automatically Write Surveys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10252/) (2024)
- [DiscoveryBench: Towards Data-Driven Discovery with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01725/) (2024)
- [Towards Scientific Intelligence: A Survey of LLM-based Scientific Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24047/) (2025)
- [LLM4SR: A Survey on Large Language Models for Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04306/) (2025)
- [BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09667/) (2024)
- [From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14111/) (2025)
- [OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-augmented LMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14199/) (2024)
- [MLR-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents on Open-Ended Machine Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19955/) (2025)
- [Paper2Poster: Towards Multimodal Poster Automation from Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21497/) (2025)
- [DeepScientist: Advancing Frontier-Pushing Scientific Findings Progressively](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26603/) (2025)
- [AI4Research: A Survey of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01903/) (2025)
- [AstaBench: Rigorous Benchmarking of AI Agents with a Scientific Research Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21652/) (2025)
- [ResearchQA: Evaluating Scholarly Question Answering at Scale Across 75 Fields with Survey-Mined Questions and Rubrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00496/) (2025)
- [Can LLM feedback enhance review quality? A randomized study of 20K reviews at ICLR 2025](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09737/) (2025)
- [Human-LLM Compound System for Scientific Ideation through Facet Recombination and Novelty Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14634/) (2024)
- [AI Idea Bench 2025: AI Research Idea Generation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14191/) (2025)
- [AIRS-Bench: a Suite of Tasks for Frontier AI Research Science Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06855/) (2026)
- [MLRC-Bench: Can Language Agents Solve Machine Learning Research Challenges?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09702/) (2025)
- [When AI Co-Scientists Fail: SPOT-a Benchmark for Automated Verification of Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11855/) (2025)
- [PaperBanana: Automating Academic Illustration for AI Scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23265/) (2026)
- [CiteBench: A benchmark for Scientific Citation Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09577/) (2022)
- [ResearchGym: Evaluating Language Model Agents on Real-World AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15112/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking LLMs' Judgments with No Gold Standard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07127/) (2024)
- [SurGE: A Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for Scientific Survey Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15658/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated research systems support literature synthesis, ideation, experiments, writing, and peer review, but their evaluation is dispersed across tasks, benchmarks, and studies that are difficult to compare directly. We review this literature from the perspective of evaluation design and evidence, covering six targets: literature synthesis, research ideation, executable workflows, scholarly writing and communication, automatic peer review, and end-to-end research. We compare task construction, evidence sources, evaluators, and scoring procedures to explain the capabilities assessed by different designs. Our synthesis highlights three recurring lessons: output checks, process checks, and human studies provide complementary information; evaluator calibration is specific to the property being assessed; and resource budgets and attempt selection are integral to interpreting performance comparisons. We identify diagnostic evaluation designs and documented gaps in supporting evidence, and translate these comparisons into reporting and audit recommendations for specific evaluation settings. The survey helps readers navigate existing evaluations, select appropriate benchmarks, and design subsequent studies.