Paper Detail

AutoSynthesis: An agentic system for automated meta-analysis

Moein Taherinezhad, Sebastian Maier, Gerardo Vitagliano, Francesco Pierri, Stefan Feuerriegel

arxiv Score 6.2

Published 2026-07-16 · First seen 2026-07-17

General AI

Abstract

Evidence synthesis is crucial for turning primary research into reliable knowledge for science, medicine, education, and policy. Yet, quantitative evidence synthesis remains largely manual and difficult to scale. Here, we introduce AutoSynthesis, an end-to-end multi-agent system for automated meta-analysis. Given a research question in natural language, AutoSynthesis formulates a search strategy, retrieves scientific literature, screens candidate studies, assesses full-text eligibility, extracts quantitative statistics, computes standardized effect sizes, and finally performs random-effects meta-analysis. AutoSynthesis further supports heterogeneity analysis to examine how effect sizes vary across moderators, as well as risk-of-bias assessment. As output, AutoSynthesis produces a transparent report aligned with PRISMA guidelines. In our application, AutoSynthesis screened over 28 studies and extracted more than 20 quantitative claims. The pooled effect estimates produced by AutoSynthesis are similar to Hedges' $g$ of expert-conducted meta-analyses, indicating close agreement with manual evidence synthesis. Together, these results show that AutoSynthesis can make quantitative evidence synthesis more scalable, thereby supporting evidence-based decision-making across disciplines.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
soon
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{taherinezhad2026autosynthesis,
  title = {AutoSynthesis: An agentic system for automated meta-analysis},
  author = {Moein Taherinezhad and Sebastian Maier and Gerardo Vitagliano and Francesco Pierri and Stefan Feuerriegel},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Evidence synthesis is crucial for turning primary research into reliable knowledge for science, medicine, education, and policy. Yet, quantitative evidence synthesis remains largely manual and difficult to scale. Here, we introduce AutoSynthesis, an end-to-end multi-agent system for automated meta-analysis. Given a research question in natural language, AutoSynthesis formulates a search strategy, retrieves scientific literature, screens candidate studies, assesses full-text eligibility, extracts},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15247},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2607.15247},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}