StudyTypeTeller-Large language models to automatically classify research study types for systematic reviews.

Emilova Doneva, Simona and de Viragh, Shirin and Hubarava, Hanna and Schandelmaier, Stefan and Briel, Matthias and Ineichen, Benjamin Victor (2025) StudyTypeTeller-Large language models to automatically classify research study types for systematic reviews. RESEARCH SYNTHESIS METHODS, 16 (6). pp. 1005-1024. ISSN 1759-2887

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Abstract

Screening, a labor-intensive aspect of systematic review, is increasingly challenging due to the rising volume of scientific publications. Recent advances suggest that generative large language models like generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) could aid this process by classifying references into study types such as randomized-controlled trials (RCTs) or animal studies prior to abstract screening. However, it is unknown how these GPT models perform in classifying such scientific study types in the biomedical field. Additionally, their performance has not been directly compared with earlier transformer-based models like bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). To address this, we developed a human-annotated corpus of 2,645 PubMed titles and abstracts, annotated for 14 study types, including different types of RCTs and animal studies, systematic reviews, study protocols, case reports, as well as in vitro studies. Using this corpus, we compared the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in automatically classifying these study types against established BERT models. Our results show that fine-tuned pretrained BERT models consistently outperformed GPT models, achieving F1-scores above 0.8, compared to approximately 0.6 for GPT models. Advanced prompting strategies did not substantially boost GPT performance. In conclusion, these findings highlight that, even though GPT models benefit from advanced capabilities and extensive training data, their performance in niche tasks like scientific multi-class study classification is inferior to smaller fine-tuned models. Nevertheless, the use of automated methods remains promising for reducing the volume of records, making the screening of large reference libraries more feasible. Our corpus is openly available and can be used to harness other natural language processing (NLP) approaches.

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