Assisting Research Proposal Writing with Large Language Models: Evaluation and Refinement

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are increasingly used in academic writing, yet issues such as incorrect or fabricated references raise ethical concerns. Moreover, current content quality evaluations often rely on subjective human judgment, which is labor-intensive and lacks objectivity, potentially compromising the consistency and reliability. In this study, to provide a quantitative evaluation and enhance research proposal writing capabilities of LLMs, we propose two key evaluation metrics--content quality and reference validity--and an iterative prompting method based on the scores derived from these two metrics. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed metrics provide an objective, quantitative framework for assessing ChatGPT's writing performance. Additionally, iterative prompting significantly enhances content quality while reducing reference inaccuracies and fabrications, addressing critical ethical challenges in academic contexts.