academic software developers

Abstract: Large language models are increasingly being used in different stages of scientific knowledge production, including the suggestion of references. These models can operate at different levels of reasoning effort and provide summaries of their reasoning processes. This raises two questions: Does increasing reasoning effort improve the verifiability of generated references, and do the resulting reasoning summaries reveal how the model's behavior changes with greater effort? We examined summaries from GPT-5.5 as it generated scholarly references for 1,000 papers under paired low- and high-effort settings. Generated references were matched to external bibliographic records, and reasoning summaries were scored for four predefined features and explored for additional features discovered by GPT-5.5. High effort increased the mean paper-level resolver-verified reference rate from 78.3% to 84.8%, and produced longer reasoning summaries. All four predefined features received higher scores under high effort. The discovered features changed less uniformly: some appeared equally often in both conditions, whereas others were more common under high effort. Within each effort condition, neither feature set showed a consistent increase in verification rates with higher scores.

Abstract: The rapid growth of scientific literature makes survey writing increasingly challenging, motivating automatic survey generation. Yet, existing systems must search an open space of papers and an open space of concepts with no trace of how the community itself has navigated them, leading to incomplete scope, weak taxonomies, and unreliable citations. Our core insight is that author-written Related Work sections contain the human judgments needed to address both limitations: authors curate the citations relevant to their contributions and explain how the cited works relate, yielding paths for scope reconstruction and relational evidence for organization. We propose InsightRAG. Its insight-guided retrieval follows author-supported citation relations to reconstruct a verified research scope and structure the resulting relational evidence. It aggregates these judgments under a minimum-conflict objective into a taxonomy that reflects recurring author-written perspectives in the retrieved literature, guides generation, and bounds each section's evidence. Results on ten topics show gains in scope reconstruction, taxonomy quality, citation support, and reference reliability.

Abstract: Most retrieval-augmented systems treat literature search as a single retrieval step followed by summarization. Real literature research works differently: the investigator's understanding of the question changes as they read, new subquestions appear, and evidence is weighed, not just collected. We present Optimist Deep Research, an open-source agent that runs literature research as an iterative evidence-acquisition process over an explicit, mutable research state. A research question is broken into a tree of subquestions, each served by search intents that are translated into source-specific queries over arXiv, OpenAlex, Crossref, PubMed, Semantic Scholar and the web. Results are merged into a canonical, provenance-preserving document registry through a conservative four-tier deduplication hierarchy. The registry is expanded by citation snowballing until a saturation criterion is met, and then screened, ranked and allocated to subquestions round-robin. Documents are read in parallel into a structured evidence store of claims with support, location, type and strength. A critic reviews the state along eight dimensions and returns research actions rather than a binary verdict: it can add, split, rephrase, deprioritize or close subquestions, so the research plan is an output of the investigation as well as an input. The final report is written section by section from the evidence store, and every citation resolves to a retrieved document. We describe the design, the deterministic machinery that keeps a language-model pipeline auditable, and a case study that read 28 of 237 retrieved documents in about three and a half minutes. We also report weaknesses the case study exposed.