Literature reviews are essential to scientific progress, but rigorously evaluating automatically generated reviews remains difficult because many aspects of research utility depend on expert judgment rather than reference-overlap metrics. We introduce LitReview Arena, a battle-style evaluation platform with a structured protocol tailored to literature review quality: domain experts with AI paper-writing experience compare anonymized drafts, are matched to topics within their expertise, and provide dimension-wise outcomes over five literature-review-specific criteria. From this protocol, we collect approximately 3k expert judgments, each containing five dimension-wise outcomes, and show that even the strongest current systems win only 23.0% of decisive matches against human drafts on overall utility, while agentic LLMs such as Sonar Deep Research substantially outperform base language models by over 60%. We further find that existing LLM-as-a-judge methods are substantially misaligned with human experts (Spearman's rho=0.467), especially on synthesis-heavy criteria such as paper structure and research suggestions. Using the collected preference data, we provide an expert-calibrated evaluator, LitJudge, which improves alignment to Spearman's rho=0.78, comparable to inter-expert consistency; code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/VanellopeAsher/LitReview-Arena.
Muhammad Ali Chaudhry, Xinyuan Hao, Haifa Alwahabycs.AI cs.HC cs.IR
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.