SynthesisJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA2025
The emergence of large language models as tools in literature reviews: a large language model-assisted systematic review.
Synthesis in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Artificial Intelligence for Evidence Synthesis of Emerging Biologics to Improve Skeletal Health in Osteogenesis Imperfecta: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Pooled it
- Definitional ambiguity in cognitive warfare: a critical and systematic conceptual review through ideal-type analysis.Frontiers in big data · 2026Pooled it
- Improving reproducibility of Plasmodium falciparum culture: a large-language-model-driven literature review and a parasite growth variability assessment of donor red blood cells.Malaria journal · 2025Pooled it
- Article
- Prioritizing Artificial Intelligence Opportunities for Food as Health in the U.S. Agrifood Value Chain.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Artificial Intelligence Resources for the Screening of Titles and Abstracts in Systematic Reviews: A Scoping Review.Cochrane evidence synthesis and methods · 2026Review
- Performance and Consistency of Large Language Models in Key Labor-Intensive Tasks of Systematic Reviews.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2026Article
- Value and Credibility of Meta-Analysis: Tutorial on Enhancing Methodological Rigor and AI-Powered Efficiency.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Article
- Potential and limitations of a large language model in the statistical review of comparative categorical data: an exploratory study of structured prompt-guided approach.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- Using full agreement across multiple large language models for title-and-abstract screening in systematic reviews: a proof-of-concept.Systematic reviews · 2026Article
- Automated full-text screening and accelerated reviews using large language models with context-aware agents: an exploratory analysis in biomarker research.European heart journal. Digital health · 2026Article
- Benchmarking a Local Schema-Constrained Large Language Model Pipeline for Abstract Screening and Evidence Mapping.Cureus · 2026Article
- From reviews to real-time: dynamic evidence in dentistry.Evidence-based dentistry · 2026Article
- Automating data extraction in meta-research: A multi-model benchmark in network psychometrics papers.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Genomic newborn screening: a scoping review of the field's evolution and associated ethical, legal, and social implications.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2026Article
- An open repository of COVID-19 vaccine mandate studies with a worked scoping review of quasi-experimental evidence.NPJ vaccines · 2026Article
- Applications of Large Language Models in Medical Research: From Systematic Reviews to Clinical Studies.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Automated extraction and optimization of protein purification protocols using multi-agent large language models.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Reflecting on LLM Support in Reflexive Thematic Analysis: An Exploratory Study.Qualitative health research · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesThis study aims to summarize the usage of large language models (LLMs) in the process of creating a scientific review by looking at the methodological papers that describe the use of LLMs in review automation and the review papers that mention they were made with the support of LLMs. MATERIALS AND
methodsThe search was conducted in June 2024 in PubMed, Scopus, Dimensions, and Google Scholar by human reviewers. Screening and extraction process took place in Covidence with the help of LLM add-on based on the OpenAI GPT-4o model. ChatGPT and Scite.ai were used in cleaning the data, generating the code for figures, and drafting the manuscript.
resultsOf the 3788 articles retrieved, 172 studies were deemed eligible for the final review. ChatGPT and GPT-based LLM emerged as the most dominant architecture for review automation (n = 126, 73.2%). A significant number of review automation projects were found, but only a limited number of papers (n = 26, 15.1%) were actual reviews that acknowledged LLM usage. Most citations focused on the automation of a particular stage of review, such as Searching for publications (n = 60, 34.9%) and Data extraction (n = 54, 31.4%). When comparing the pooled performance of GPT-based and BERT-based models, the former was better in data extraction with a mean precision of 83.0% (SD = 10.4) and a recall of 86.0% (SD = 9.8). DISCUSSION AND
conclusionOur LLM-assisted systematic review revealed a significant number of research projects related to review automation using LLMs. Despite limitations, such as lower accuracy of extraction for numeric data, we anticipate that LLMs will soon change the way scientific reviews are conducted.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.