# ResearchQA: Evaluating Scholarly Question Answering at Scale Across 75 Fields with Survey-Mined Questions and Rubrics

Source: [ResearchQA: Evaluating Scholarly Question Answering at Scale Across 75 Fields with Survey-Mined Questions and Rubrics](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7b0d1e209131cea8665e>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-12-23T05:00:04.997Z

Authors: Li S. Yifei, Allen Chang, Chaitanya Malaviya, Mark Yatskar

Published: 2025-08-30T13:37:28.000Z

## Abstract

Evaluating long-form responses to research queries heavily relies on expert annotators, restricting attention to areas like AI where researchers can conveniently enlist colleagues. Yet, research expertise is abundant: survey articles consolidate knowledge spread across the literature. We introduce ResearchQA, a resource for evaluating LLM systems by distilling survey articles from 75 research fields into 21K queries and 160K rubric items. Queries and rubrics are jointly derived from survey sections, where rubric items list query-specific answer evaluation criteria, i.e., citing papers, making explanations, and describing limitations. 31 Ph.D. annotators in 8 fields judge that 90% of queries reflect Ph.D. information needs and 87% of rubric items warrant emphasis of a sentence or longer. We leverage ResearchQA to evaluate 18 systems in 7.6K head-to-heads. No parametric or retrieval-augmented system we evaluate exceeds 70% on covering rubric items, and the highest-ranking system shows 75% coverage. Error analysis reveals that the highest-ranking system fully addresses less than 11% of citation rubric items, 48% of limitation items, and 49% of comparison items. We release our data to facilitate more comprehensive multi-field evaluations.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00496>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00496.pdf>)