IdeaSynth: Iterative Research Idea Development Through Evolving and Composing Idea Facets with Literature-Grounded Feedback

TL;DR

IdeaSynth is a system that leverages large language models to support researchers in iteratively developing and refining research ideas by providing literature-grounded feedback and facilitating idea composition.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system that enables iterative research idea development through idea facets, composition, and literature-grounded feedback, filling a gap in existing tools.

Findings

Participants explored more alternative ideas with IdeaSynth.

Participants expanded initial ideas with more details.

Effective use of IdeaSynth in real-world research workflows.

Abstract

Research ideation involves broad exploring and deep refining ideas. Both require deep engagement with literature. Existing tools focus primarily on idea broad generation, yet offer little support for iterative specification, refinement, and evaluation needed to further develop initial ideas. To bridge this gap, we introduce IdeaSynth, a research idea development system that uses LLMs to provide literature-grounded feedback for articulating research problems, solutions, evaluations, and contributions. IdeaSynth represents these idea facets as nodes on a canvas, and allow researchers to iteratively refine them by creating and exploring variations and composing them. Our lab study (N=20) showed that participants, while using IdeaSynth, explored more alternative ideas and expanded initial ideas with more details compared to a strong LLM-based baseline. Our deployment study (N=7) demonstrated that participants effectively used IdeaSynth for real-world research projects at various ideation stages from developing initial ideas to revising framings of mature manuscripts, highlighting the possibilities to adopt IdeaSynth in researcher's workflows.