Can machine learning help accelerate article screening for systematic reviews? Yes, when article separability in...

Systematic reviews play important roles but manual efforts can be time-consuming given a growing literature. There is a need to use and evaluate automated strategies to accelerate systematic reviews. Here, we comprehensively tested machine learning (ML) models from classical and deep learning model families. We also assessed the performance of prompt engineering via few-shot learning of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 large language models (LLMs). We further attempted to understand when ML models can help automate screening. These ML models were applied to actual datasets of systematic reviews in education. Results showed that the performance of classical and deep ML models varied widely across datasets, ranging from 1.2 to 75.6% of work saved at 95% recall. LLM prompt engineering produced similarly wide performance variation. We searched for various indicators of whether and how ML screening can help. We discovered that the separability of clusters of relevant versus irrelevant articles in high-dimensional embedding space can strongly predict whether ML screening can help (overall R = 0.81). This simple and generalizable heuristic applied well across datasets and different ML model families. In conclusion, ML screening performance varies tremendously, but researchers and software developers can consider using our cluster separability heuristic in various ways in an ML-assisted screening pipeline.