LLMs for Academic Workflows: An Evaluation of Literature Reviews Generated with Short and Long Context Windows of LLMs

Our research focuses on evaluating literature reviews generated in short and long context settings of large language models (LLMs) to investigate the impact of context window on the quality of AI-generated literature reviews and the role of AI in supporting literature review writing. Twenty AI-generated literature reviews based on research sources from Semantic Scholar and Arxiv were evaluated by two researchers across 15 dimensions. Our findings reveal that AI-generated literature reviews require human oversight to meet academic publishing standards. As context windows increase, LLMs can incorporate broader information and maintain coherence across longer inputs, but they also exacerbate issues such as content repetition, omission of critical work, and a tendency towards descriptiveness over synthesis. Our work shows that AI-generated reviews can provide foundational overviews, but their output must be critically evaluated and refined by domain experts. Future research should consider integrating other LLMs and fine-tuned models in different domains with hybrid approaches that combine human expertise with AI capabilities to address the limitations identified in this study.