[bee_rider]

What are review papers for anyway? I think they are either for

1) new grad students to end up with something nice to publish after reviewing the literature or,

2) older professors to write a big overview of everything that happened in their field as sort of a “bible” that can get you up to speed

The former is useful as a social construct; I mean, hey, new grad students, don’t skimp on your literature review. Finding out a couple years in that folks had already done something sorta similar to my work was absolutely gut-wrenching.

For the latter, I don’t think LLMs are quite ready to replace the personal experiences of a late-career professor, right?

[CamperBob2]

Ultimately, a key reason to write these papers in the first place is to guide practitioners in the field, right? Otherwise science itself is just a big (redacted term that can get people shadow-banned for simply using it).

As one of those practitioners, I've found good review/survey papers to be incredibly valuable. They call my attention to the important publications and provide at least a basic timeline that helps me understand how the field has evolved from the beginning and what aspects people are focusing on now.

At the same time, I'll confess that I don't really see why most such papers couldn't be written by LLMs. Ideally by better LLMs than we have now, of course, but that could go without saying.

[trostaft]

I've found (good) review papers invaluable as an academic. They're really useful as a fast ladder to getting up to speed in a new area. Usually they have a great literature review (with the important papers to read afterward), a curated list of results important to understand, and good intuition about how to reason. It's a compactification of what I would have to otherwise gain by working in an area for years. No replacement for it, of course, but does make it easier attain.

I don't understand the appeal of an (majorly-)LLM generated review paper. A good review paper is a hard task to write well, and frankly the only good ones I've read have come from authors who are at apex of their field (and are, in particular, strong writers). The 'lossy search' of an LLM is probably an outstanding tool for _refining_ a review paper, but for fully generating it? At least not with current LLMs.