Title: ScholarEval: Research Idea Evaluation Grounded in Literature
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: research idea evaluation, literature-grounded, multi-domain, ai4science

Abstract: As AI tools become increasingly common for research ideation, robust evaluation is critical to ensure the validity and usefulness of generated ideas. We introduce ScholarEval, a retrieval-augmented evaluation framework that assesses research ideas based on two fundamental criteria: soundness—the empirical validity of proposed methods based on existing literature, and contribution—the degree of advancement made by the idea across different dimensions relative to prior research. To evaluate ScholarEval, we introduce ScholarIdeas, the first expert-annotated dataset of multi-domain research ideas and reviews, comprising 117 ideas across four disciplines: artificial intelligence, neuroscience, biochemistry, and ecology. Our evaluation shows that ScholarEval achieves significantly higher coverage of points mentioned in the human expert annotated rubrics in ScholarIdeas compared to all baselines. Furthermore, ScholarEval is consistently preferred over our strongest baseline o4-mini-deep-research, a reasoning and search-enabled agentic system by OpenAI, in terms of evaluation actionability, depth, and evidence support. Our large-scale user study also shows that ScholarEval significantly outperforms deep research in literature engagement, idea refinement, and usefulness. We will openly release our code, dataset, and ScholarEval tool for the community to use and build on.