Novelty-Aware Agentic Retrieval: Comparing Research Contributions Through Structured Multi-Step Reasoning

Scientific literature search is an information retrieval (IR) task in which ranked lists are insufficient: a researcher entering a new area needs to know not only which papers are relevant, but how they relate, where they overlap, how they differ, and what problem-method combinations are absent. Standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) summarizes documents independently, discarding this comparative signal. We present the Novelty-Aware Research Agent, a prototype agentic retrieval system that layers structured multi-step reasoning on a RAG pipeline through six typed-contract components: query analysis, a ReAct-style retrieval loop, relevance ranking, schema-guided contribution extraction, a three-pass comparison agent, and answer generation. Beyond returning relevant papers, it produces structured comparison artifacts: per-paper contribution records, paper-level overlaps, and a problem x method gap matrix. On a 100-paper corpus, the system supports five structured comparison capabilities that a standard RAG baseline supports none of, while remaining query-sensitive: across three main queries no paper appears in all three top-5 sets (mean pairwise Jaccard 0.12), and an extended seven-query evaluation holds the pattern across ten queries (mean Jaccard 0.115, 18 of 29 retrieved papers query-exclusive). Under author-assigned graded relevance the ranker attains mean Precision@5 1.000 and nDCG@5 0.752 on the main queries, ahead of BM25, dense, and hybrid retrieval; over ten queries Precision@5 is non-saturated at 0.980 with nDCG@5 0.739. Schema compliance is 86.7% on the main queries and 84.0% over the ten-query set, and validating 20 sampled empty gap-matrix cells yields a gap precision of 0.600. We discuss the latency-structure trade-off in agentic retrieval and identify corpus scale, author-assigned labels, and limited independent evaluation as the main limitations.