Performance of LLMs in Citation Screening: A Comparison Across Datasets with Varied Inclusion Rates
Zhihong Zhang, Mohamad Javad Momeni Nezhad, Pallavi Gupta, Maxim Topaz, Maryam Zolnoori · Studies in health technology and informatics · 2025
Systematic reviews involve time-intensive processes of screening titles, abstracts, and full texts to identify relevant studies. This study evaluates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate citation screening across three datasets with varying inclusion rates. Six LLMs were tested using zero- to five-shot in context-learning, with demonstration selection using PubMedBERT for semantic similarity. Majority voting and ensemble learning were applied to enhance performance. Results showed that no single LLM consistently excelled across the datasets, with sensitivity and specificity influenced by inclusion rates. Overall, ensemble learning and majority voting improved performance in citation screening.