Higher Reasoning Effort Improves Reference Verifiability and Changes Reasoning Summaries in GPT-5.5

Abstract

Large language models are increasingly being used in different stages of scientific knowledge production, including the suggestion of references. These models can operate at different levels of reasoning effort and provide summaries of their reasoning processes. This raises two questions: Does increasing reasoning effort improve the verifiability of generated references, and do the resulting reasoning summaries reveal how the model's behavior changes with greater effort? We examined summaries from GPT-5.5 as it generated scholarly references for 1,000 papers under paired low- and high-effort settings. Generated references were matched to external bibliographic records, and reasoning summaries were scored for four predefined features and explored for additional features discovered by GPT-5.5. High effort increased the mean paper-level resolver-verified reference rate from 78.3% to 84.8%, and produced longer reasoning summaries. All four predefined features received higher scores under high effort. The discovered features changed less uniformly: some appeared equally often in both conditions, whereas others were more common under high effort. Within each effort condition, neither feature set showed a consistent increase in verification rates with higher scores.