🤖 AI Summary
Current AI research tools lack evaluation benchmarks that simultaneously account for usability, interpretability, and integration into scientific workflows, making it difficult to assess their practical reliability in academic settings. This work proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework that integrates human-centered dimensions—such as usability and interpretability—with computational metrics. Through a human-AI collaborative approach—including explainable AI (xAI) analysis, source tracing validation, task-oriented testing, and workflow integration observation—the study systematically evaluates AI-powered question-answering and literature review tools on both exploratory and precision-oriented tasks. Findings reveal a core tension: while these tools effectively support initial exploration by providing useful overviews, they exhibit unreliable precision in factual extraction, with xAI highlights often misaligned with actual answers. Similarly, literature tools aid preliminary discovery but suffer from poor reproducibility and low transparency, necessitating rigorous human verification.
📝 Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being incorporated into scientific research workflows with the potential to enhance efficiency in tasks such as document analysis, question answering (Q and A), and literature search. However, system outputs are often difficult to verify, lack transparency in their generation and remain prone to errors. Suitable benchmarks are needed to document and evaluate arising issues. Nevertheless, existing benchmarking approaches are not adequately capturing human-centered criteria such as usability, interpretability, and integration into research workflows. To address this gap, the present work proposes and applies a benchmarking framework combining human-centered and computer-centered metrics to evaluate AI-based Q&A and literature review tools for research use. The findings suggest that Q and A tools can offer valuable overviews and generally accurate summaries; however, they are not always reliable for precise information extraction. Explainable AI (xAI) accuracy was particularly low, meaning highlighted source passages frequently failed to correspond to generated answers. This shifted the burden of validation back onto the researcher. Literature review tools supported exploratory searches but showed low reproducibility, limited transparency regarding chosen sources and databases, and inconsistent source quality, making them unsuitable for systematic reviews. A comparison of these tool groups reveals a similar pattern: while AI tools can enhance efficiency in the early stages of the research workflow and shallow tasks, their outputs still require human verification. The findings underscore the importance of explainability features to enhance transparency, verification efficiency and careful integration of AI tools into researchers' workflows. Further, human-centered evaluation remains an important concern to ensure practical applicability.