When are AI tools useful?
AI tools for scholarly literature can be useful for a quick overview of the literature on any topic. In answer to a simple question such as 'Does physical exercise improve cognition in adults?', you receive a summary based on scholarly information with links to the (real) references. Scholarly AI tools speed up the process of searching, screening and reading abstracts and distracting the key messages in answer to any question.

When are they not useful?
The information provided by AI tools may be incorrect or incomplete and the references may be outdated or less trustworthy. Because the information cannot be trusted for sure, these AI tools cannot replace scientific databases. For a reliable answer to a clinical question, you still need a systematic, transparent and reproducible search in databases like PubMed and the Cochrane Library and you must critically read original articles. 

AI tool examples (with a free version)

• Scite
• Elicit
• Consensus
• Perplexity 

Are you using another AI-based tool for finding research publications? 
Let us know via literaturesearch@umcg.nl 

Systematic reviews provide evidence based summaries in answer to specific clinical questions. They are conducted following a rigorous methodology. Conducting a systematic review is teamwork and it is a time consuming task. One of the steps that takes time is the title-abstract screening of thousand(s) of articles. AI may speed up this first step by predicting what next article has the best chance to be marked as included, after marking a limited number of articles as included and excluded. 
Using an AI-based tool is tempting, however, researchers that use an AI tool to speed up the screening step must be prepared to invest time in finding to use the tool well for their research and how to comply with the high standards for systematic reviews.

Example

AsReview (open source)
Links

• Asreview articles in PubMed
• Asreview via Google Scholar
• asreview discussions github
• Asreview.nl community

Are you affiliated to the UMCG and (considering) using an AI-tool to speed up the screening in your systematic review? 
Feel free to contact
Email: literaturesearch@umcg.nl or s.van.der.werf@umcg.nl (Sjoukje).