Evolving Roles of LLMs in Scientific Innovation: Assistant, Collaborator, Scientist, and Evaluator

ArXi:2507.11810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific research and discovery, ing tasks ranging from literature retrieval and synthesis to hypothesis generation, autonomous experimentation, and research evaluation. Existing surveys often conflate scientific research with scientific discovery and typically organize systems by domain, task, or autonomy level alone. In this survey, we propose a four-role framework for understanding LLMs in scientific innovation: Assistant, Collaborator, Scientist, and Evaluator.