Prompt Chaining in Practice: A Case Study in Automated Scholarly Report Generation

Abstract:The exponential growth of scholarly publications requires automated tools for effective information synthesis. However, simple, single-shot prompting methods often lack the reliability and quality required for complex synthesis tasks. This paper introduces and empirically evaluates a multi-stage prompt chaining methodology as a more reliable architectural pattern for such tasks. This approach is implemented in our system, AI SciBrief, which automatically generates scholarly digests. We conducted a comparative experiment, measuring the performance of our prompt chaining method against a carefully optimized single-shot baseline. Both systems were evaluated against a human-authored "gold standard" report for the "Education" domain. The results demonstrate a significant difference in reliability: our prompt chaining method achieved a 100% success rate, whereas the optimized baseline failed in 50% of its runs. In terms of quality, the proposed method also demonstrated a clear advantage, achieving a superior ROUGE-L F1-score (0.507 vs. 0.486), driven primarily by higher precision. We conclude that prompt chaining is a more dependable and effective engineering approach for complex, multi-step generative tasks, significantly mitigating the risks of failure and inconsistency inherent in monolithic prompts.

This is the version of the article accepted for publication in SUMMA 2025 after peer review. The final, published version is available at IEEE Xplore: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science (cs.CE); Digital Libraries (cs.DL); Software Engineering (cs.SE)

arXiv:2607.27210 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.27210v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.27210 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

2025 7th International Conference on Control Systems, Mathematical Modeling, Automation and Energy Efficiency (SUMMA), Lipetsk, Russian Federation, 2025, pp. 704-710

https://doi.org/10.1109/SUMMA68668.2025.11302303 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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