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: https://doi.org/10.1109/SUMMA68668.2025.11302303