Artificial intelligence as team member versus manual screening to conduct systematic reviews in medical sciences

Systematic reviews require substantial time and effort. This study compared the results of conducting reviews by human reviewers with those conducted with Artificial Intelligence (AI). We identified 11 AI tools that could assist in conducting a systematic review. None of the AI tools could retrieve all articles that were detected with a manual search strategy. We identified tools for deduplication but did not evaluate them. AI screening tools assist the human reviewer in presenting the most relevant article on top, which could reduce the number of articles that need to be screened on title and abstract, and on full text. There was a poor inter-rater reliability to evaluate the risk of bias between AI tools and the human reviewers. A summary table created by AI tools differs substantially from manually constructed summary tables. This study highlights the potential of AI tools to support systematic reviews, particularly during screening phases, but not to replace human reviews.