An Autonomous Scientific Knowledge Generation Framework for AI-Driven Scientific Discovery

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming scientific discovery, but its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by the availability of structured scientific knowledge. Although existing databases have accelerated data-driven materials research, much of the knowledge needed for predictive modeling and inverse design remains embedded in unstructured scientific literature. We present an Autonomous Scientific Knowledge Generation Framework that transforms scientific publications into a Unified AI-Ready Scientific Knowledge Base. The framework integrates ontology-guided literature acquisition, hybrid scientific knowledge extraction, semantic harmonization, knowledge fusion, and validation within a unified workflow. Rather than treating literature retrieval, information extraction, and database construction as separate tasks, the framework progressively converts scientific publications into structured, semantically consistent, and provenance-preserving knowledge suitable for AI-driven reasoning. As a proof of concept, the framework was applied to electro-optic materials. Autonomous literature acquisition retrieved and validated about 1,000 publications from multiple scholarly repositories. A representative subset of eight publications was processed through the complete workflow, generating 29 structured scientific records that were harmonized into 7 canonical scientific records. The results demonstrate the complete transformation from scientific literature to an AI-ready scientific knowledge base while preserving quantitative measurements, operating conditions, provenance, and scientific context. The proposed framework provides a scalable, domain-independent foundation for predictive AI, generative AI, and closed-loop AI-driven scientific discovery.