Evidence map›Paper›PMID 42149639›Full record

ArticleJMIR infodemiology2026

Performance of Large Language Models in the Cognitive Analysis of Misinformation: Evaluation Study.

Dominika Nadia Wojtczak, Cheryl McQuire, Luisa Zuccolo, Claudia Peersman, Ryan McConville

Abstract readEvaluation Study
In one paragraph

Article in JMIR infodemiology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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0citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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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.

2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

Dominika Nadia WojtczakSchool of Computer Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.ORCID 0009-0006-9322-9278
Cheryl McQuireBristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.ORCID 0000-0003-0127-8015
Luisa ZuccoloHealth Data Science Centre, Human Technopole, Milan, Italy.ORCID 0000-0002-7049-3037
Claudia PeersmanSchool of Computer Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.ORCID 0000-0001-8995-7017
Ryan McConvilleSchool of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.ORCID 0000-0002-7708-3110

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundPublic discourse is significantly impacted by the rapid spread of misinformation on social media platforms. Human moderators, while capable of performing well, face many challenges due to scalability. While large language models (LLMs) show great potential across various language tasks, their capacity for cognitive and contextual analysis, in detecting and interpreting misinformation, remains less evaluated.

objectiveThis study evaluates the effectiveness of LLMs in detecting and interpreting misinformation compared to human annotators, focusing on tasks requiring cognitive analysis and complex judgment. Additionally, we analyze the influence of different prompt engineering strategies on model performance and discuss ethical considerations for using LLMs in content moderation systems.

methodsWe evaluated 4 OpenAI models against a panel of human annotators using a subset of posts from the MuMiN dataset. Each model and human annotator responded to structured questions on misinformation, following an established cognitive framework. Both human annotators and LLMs also provided scores indicating how confident they were in their responses. Various prompting strategies were used in this research, including: 0-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought, with performance evaluated through precision, recall, F

resultsGPT-4 Turbo with chain-of-thought prompting achieved the highest performance of all LLMs for detecting misinformation, with an accuracy of 67.2% and an F

conclusionsLLMs show significant potential for automating misinformation detection. Their limitations in understanding and interpreting these posts highlight the current necessity of human oversight. A hybrid framework combining LLMs for preliminary screening with human moderators for more complex evaluation presents a promising future direction. Future research could prioritize the fine-tuning of LLMs using datasets that emphasize cognitive and emotional linguistic features, alongside the development of advanced prompting techniques.

Indexed as

CognitionCommunicationLarge Language ModelsHumansSocial Mediacognitive analysiscognitive reasoningfake newsground truthintentlarge language modelLLMonline misinformationpanel of annotatorsreasoning

Identifiers

PMID42149639
PMCPMC13227085

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

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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.