Critical Care Explorations (Oct 2023)

Clinical Research With Large Language Models Generated Writing—Clinical Research with AI-assisted Writing (CRAW) Study

  • Ivan A. Huespe, MD,
  • Jorge Echeverri, MD,
  • Aisha Khalid, MD,
  • Indalecio Carboni Bisso, MD,
  • Carlos G. Musso, PhD,
  • Salim Surani, MD,
  • Vikas Bansal, MBBS, MPH,
  • Rahul Kashyap, MD

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1097/CCE.0000000000000975
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 10
p. e0975

Abstract

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IMPORTANCE:. The scientific community debates Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)-3.5’s article quality, authorship merit, originality, and ethical use in scientific writing. OBJECTIVES:. Assess GPT-3.5’s ability to craft the background section of critical care clinical research questions compared to medical researchers with H-indices of 22 and 13. DESIGN:. Observational cross-sectional study. SETTING:. Researchers from 20 countries from six continents evaluated the backgrounds. PARTICIPANTS:. Researchers with a Scopus index greater than 1 were included. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES:. In this study, we generated a background section of a critical care clinical research question on “acute kidney injury in sepsis” using three different methods: researcher with H-index greater than 20, researcher with H-index greater than 10, and GPT-3.5. The three background sections were presented in a blinded survey to researchers with an H-index range between 1 and 96. First, the researchers evaluated the main components of the background using a 5-point Likert scale. Second, they were asked to identify which background was written by humans only or with large language model-generated tools. RESULTS:. A total of 80 researchers completed the survey. The median H-index was 3 (interquartile range, 1–7.25) and most (36%) researchers were from the Critical Care specialty. When compared with researchers with an H-index of 22 and 13, GPT-3.5 was marked high on the Likert scale ranking on main background components (median 4.5 vs. 3.82 vs. 3.6 vs. 4.5, respectively; p < 0.001). The sensitivity and specificity to detect researchers writing versus GPT-3.5 writing were poor, 22.4% and 57.6%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE:. GPT-3.5 could create background research content indistinguishable from the writing of a medical researcher. It was marked higher compared with medical researchers with an H-index of 22 and 13 in writing the background section of a critical care clinical research question.