Using Large Language Models to Automate Category and Trend Analysis of Scientific Articles: An Application in Ophthalmology

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated classification method using Large Language Models for ophthalmology articles, demonstrating high accuracy and efficiency, with potential applications in other scientific fields for trend analysis and knowledge organization.

Contribution

The study develops and evaluates an LLM-based framework for scientific article classification, achieving high accuracy and demonstrating extendibility beyond ophthalmology.

Findings

Achieved mean accuracy of 0.86 on ophthalmology articles

Demonstrated effectiveness of LLMs in large-scale article categorization

Showed potential for cross-disciplinary application and trend analysis

Abstract

Purpose: In this paper, we present an automated method for article classification, leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLM). The primary focus is on the field of ophthalmology, but the model is extendable to other fields. Methods: We have developed a model based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including advanced LLMs, to process and analyze the textual content of scientific papers. Specifically, we have employed zero-shot learning (ZSL) LLM models and compared against Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformers (BART) and its variants, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and its variant such as distilBERT, SciBERT, PubmedBERT, BioBERT. Results: The classification results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLMs in categorizing large number of ophthalmology papers without human intervention. Results: To evalute the LLMs, we compiled a dataset (RenD) of 1000 ocular disease-related articles, which were expertly annotated by a panel of six specialists into 15 distinct categories. The model achieved mean accuracy of 0.86 and mean F1 of 0.85 based on the RenD dataset. Conclusion: The proposed framework achieves notable improvements in both accuracy and efficiency. Its application in the domain of ophthalmology showcases its potential for knowledge organization and retrieval in other domains too. We performed trend analysis that enables the researchers and clinicians to easily categorize and retrieve relevant papers, saving time and effort in literature review and information gathering as well as identification of emerging scientific trends within different disciplines. Moreover, the extendibility of the model to other scientific fields broadens its impact in facilitating research and trend analysis across diverse disciplines.