The Survey Paper Bot That Makes You Bring Your Own Bibliography

What it does

SurveyX is an LLM-driven pipeline that generates academic survey papers from a title, keywords, and a directory of reference documents. It structures the material into an outline, drafts content, refines it, and compiles everything into a LaTeX-rendered PDF. The open-source release handles the entire writing and formatting workflow offline, but leaves the literature acquisition entirely to you.

The interesting bit

The project is refreshingly candid about its split personality: the open-source repository is deliberately handicapped compared to the hosted service at surveyx.cn. It will not crawl the web, query paper databases, or expand your keywords, so you must bring your own bibliography converted to Markdown format.

Key highlights

• Generates structured outlines, draft content, and LaTeX sources automatically from a local reference folder
• Produces a compiled PDF survey paper with standard academic formatting via a built-in LaTeX pipeline
• Supports step-by-step execution (outline → content → refinement → LaTeX) or a single end-to-end run
• Ships with example survey papers across domains including databases, computational linguistics, and complexity theory
• The hosted version offers real-time search, semantic filtering, and multimodal parsing; the open-source version does not

Caveats

• The open-source version cannot search for or retrieve papers; it only works with references you manually convert to Markdown and upload
• Requires a configured LLM API endpoint and a local LaTeX environment to produce PDFs
• The README is upfront about missing features but vague on which LLMs work best or how the refinement step actually improves quality

Verdict

Worth a look if you already have a curated collection of papers in Markdown and want an automated ghostwriter to turn them into a formatted survey. Skip it if you need help finding literature or want a fully integrated research assistant.