LitPivot: Developing research ideas through dynamic contextualization within the literature landscape

LitPivot is a system developed with University of Pennsylvania collaborators that organizes retrieved literature around the facet of a research proposal being edited, offers critiques supported by excerpts from selected studies, and suggests revisions researchers can accept, edit, or reject. In a study with 17 researchers, domain experts rated ideas developed with LitPivot as better grounded in the literature than those developed with a text editor and an AI chat tool, and participants perceived their revised ideas as more novel and useful. LitPivot will be presented at UIST 2026 in Detroit.