Comment on arXiv:2607.01233: Survivorship Bias in Published-Paper Baselines for Research-Idea Distributions

RESUMO

Chen, Zhao, and Cohan introduce a valuable distributional evaluation of LLM-generated research ideas. This comment raises a narrower identification concern: their human baseline consists of published papers, whereas the LLM baseline consists of one-shot proposals. If bridge-like or synthesis-like ideas are relatively easy to generate but relatively unlikely to survive publication, then the published human baseline will understate their prevalence in the unseen human idea pool. The observed human--LLM gap may therefore be partly, or even largely, a consequence of survivorship bias.