ScholarQuest: A Taxonomy-Guided Benchmark for Agentic Academic Paper Search in Open Literature Environments

Abstract

Academic paper search is a core step in scientific research, and LLM-based search agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for iterative, intent-driven literature exploration. However, existing benchmarks offer limited coverage of research intents and insufficient support for scalable answer construction and reproducible multi-turn evaluation. We propose \textbf{ScholarQuest}, a taxonomy-guided benchmark constructed from over 1,000 computer science topics and organized around four research intents. To construct answer sets at scale, we combine multi-source retrieval, citation expansion, and multi-stage relevance adjudication. We further build \textit{\textbf{ScholarBase}}, a million-scale literature environment with unified retrieval and citation-expansion interfaces, together with a shared multi-turn search harness. We benchmark complete literature search systems and compare language models within this harness, evaluating retrieval coverage, search efficiency, and robustness across research intents. Results show that agentic methods outperform single-shot retrieval baselines, yet the best-performing search system achieves only 0.312 Recall@100 and 0.352 Recall@All. Comparisons under the shared harness reveal intent-dependent model strengths, with higher Planner token consumption not consistently yielding higher recall. We release the benchmark, retrieval backend, and evaluation harness for reproducible research