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The future of reviews writing in the AI era

Agentic workflows powered by large language models are beginning to assist chemists in literature search, summarization, and outline drafting. Though they remain unable to replace expert insight, these systems promise to reshape how reviews are prepared — shifting the human role from exhaustive curator to creative synthesizer, empowered by intelligent, always-on review-copilots.

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Fig. 1: Ladder of autonomy in AI-assisted review writing.

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Acknowledgements

Z.Z. extends special gratitude to J. Weng from OpenAI and K. Dong from Stanford University for valuable discussions.

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Correspondence to Zhiling Zheng.

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Zheng, Z. The future of reviews writing in the AI era. Nat Rev Chem 9, 495–496 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-025-00738-y

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