From Text to Discovery: How Are LLMs Reshaping Scientific and Humanistic Research?

arXiv:2606.08723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping academic research across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, yet the scientific community lacks a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary account of how these tools are being integrated, what they deliver, and where they fall short. This paper addresses that gap by mapping their current state and outlining an agenda for their responsible integration into scientific research. Our analysis reveals a consistent pattern: LLMs meaningfully accelerate research workflows -- from hypothesis generation and literature synthesis to data analysis and scientific writing -- while introducing serious challenges related to hallucination, reproducibility, dataset bias, and model opacity. Beyond technical limitations, we identify ten underexplored challenges, including the erosion of researcher autonomy, AI-driven confirmation bias, authorship ambiguity, and unequal access to these technologies -- systemic risks that demand interdisciplinary governance frameworks, robust validation standards, and expanded explainability research.