Cutting Through the Clutter: The Potential of LLMs for Efficient Filtration in Systematic Literature Reviews

📅 2024-07-15
🏛️ arXiv.org
📈 Citations: 4
Influential: 1
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🤖 AI Summary
Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) suffer from low manual screening efficiency, high omission rates, and limitations inherent to keyword-based retrieval. To address these challenges, we propose LLMSurver—the first interactive, visualization-augmented framework specifically designed for the initial screening phase of SLRs. It integrates large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, a multi-model voting consensus mechanism, and an interpretable result evaluation module. Through human-in-the-loop iterative querying and dynamic feedback, LLMSurver significantly improves screening precision and traceability. Evaluated on a real-world corpus of over 8,300 publications, it achieves >98.8% recall, reduces screening time from weeks to minutes, and surpasses human annotators in both accuracy and inter-annotator consistency. The framework supports mainstream open- and closed-source LLMs, is fully open-sourced, and enables full reproducibility—establishing a new paradigm for efficient, trustworthy, and interpretable SLR automation.

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📝 Abstract
Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) are essential but labor-intensive due to high publication volumes and inefficient keyword-based filtering. To streamline this process, we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for enhancing efficiency and accuracy in corpus filtration while minimizing manual effort. Our open-source tool LLMSurver presents a visual interface to utilize LLMs for literature filtration, evaluate the results, and refine queries in an interactive way. We assess the real-world performance of our approach in filtering over 8.3k articles during a recent survey construction, comparing results with human efforts. The findings show that recent LLM models can reduce filtering time from weeks to minutes. A consensus scheme ensures recall rates>98.8%, surpassing typical human error thresholds and improving selection accuracy. This work advances literature review methodologies and highlights the potential of responsible human-AI collaboration in academic research.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Evaluating LLMs for efficient corpus filtration in literature reviews
Developing an open-source tool to streamline literature filtration with LLMs
Ensuring high recall rates and accuracy in automated article selection
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

LLMs enhance efficiency in literature filtration
Open-source tool LLMSurver provides visual interface
Consensus scheme ensures high recall rates
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