Clinical Research With Large Language Models Generated Writing-Clinical Research with AI-assisted Writing (CRAW) Study.

importanceThe scientific community debates Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)-3.5's article quality, authorship merit, originality, and ethical use in scientific writing.

objectivesAssess GPT-3.5's ability to craft the background section of critical care clinical research questions compared to medical researchers with H-indices of 22 and 13.

designObservational cross-sectional study.

settingResearchers from 20 countries from six continents evaluated the backgrounds.

participantsResearchers with a Scopus index greater than 1 were included. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: In this study, we generated a background section of a critical care clinical research question on "acute kidney injury in sepsis" using three different methods: researcher with H-index greater than 20, researcher with H-index greater than 10, and GPT-3.5. The three background sections were presented in a blinded survey to researchers with an H-index range between 1 and 96. First, the researchers evaluated the main components of the background using a 5-point Likert scale. Second, they were asked to identify which background was written by humans only or with large language model-generated tools.

resultsA total of 80 researchers completed the survey. The median H-index was 3 (interquartile range, 1-7.25) and most (36%) researchers were from the Critical Care specialty. When compared with researchers with an H-index of 22 and 13, GPT-3.5 was marked high on the Likert scale ranking on main background components (median 4.5 vs. 3.82 vs. 3.6 vs. 4.5, respectively; CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: GPT-3.5 could create background research content indistinguishable from the writing of a medical researcher. It was marked higher compared with medical researchers with an H-index of 22 and 13 in writing the background section of a critical care clinical research question.