Exploring the use of LLMs for the selection phase in systematic literature studies

Abstract

Context:

Systematic literature studies, such as secondary studies, are crucial to aggregate evidence. An essential part of these studies is the selection phase of relevant studies. This, however, is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and error-prone as it highly depends on manual labor and domain expertise. The increasing popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) raises the question to what extent these manual study selection tasks could be supported in an automated manner.

Objectives:

In this manuscript, we report on our effort to explore and evaluate the use of state-of-the-art LLMs to automate the selection phase in systematic literature studies.

Method:

We evaluated LLMs for the selection phase using two published systematic literature studies in software engineering as ground truth. Three prompts were designed and applied across five LLMs to the studies’ titles and abstracts based on their inclusion and exclusion criteria. Additionally, we analyzed combining two LLMs to replicate a practical selection phase. We analyzed recall and precision and reflected upon the accuracy of the LLMs, and whether the ground truth studies were conducted by early career scholars or by more advanced ones.

Results:

Our results show a high average recall of up to 98% combined with a precision of 27% in a single LLM approach and an average recall of 99% with a precision of 27% in a two-model approach replicating a two-reviewer procedure. Further the Llama 2 models showed the highest average recall 98% across all prompt templates and datasets while GPT4-turbo had the highest average precision 72%.

Conclusions:

Our results demonstrate how LLMs could support a selection phase in the future. We recommend a two LLM-approach to archive a higher recall. However, we also critically reflect upon how further studies are required using other models and prompts on more datasets to strengthen the confidence in our presented approach.