Evaluating Research Quality with Large Language Models: An Analysis of ChatGPT's Effectiveness with Different Settings and Inputs

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1. Verfasser: Thelwall, Mike
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Thelwall, Mike
author_facet Thelwall, Mike
contents Evaluating the quality of academic journal articles is a time consuming but critical task for national research evaluation exercises, appointments and promotion. It is therefore important to investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can play a role in this process. This article assesses which ChatGPT inputs (full text without tables, figures and references; title and abstract; title only) produce better quality score estimates, and the extent to which scores are affected by ChatGPT models and system prompts. The results show that the optimal input is the article title and abstract, with average ChatGPT scores based on these (30 iterations on a dataset of 51 papers) correlating at 0.67 with human scores, the highest ever reported. ChatGPT 4o is slightly better than 3.5-turbo (0.66), and 4o-mini (0.66). The results suggest that article full texts might confuse LLM research quality evaluations, even though complex system instructions for the task are more effective than simple ones. Thus, whilst abstracts contain insufficient information for a thorough assessment of rigour, they may contain strong pointers about originality and significance. Finally, linear regression can be used to convert the model scores into the human scale scores, which is 31% more accurate than guessing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_06752
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Research Quality with Large Language Models: An Analysis of ChatGPT's Effectiveness with Different Settings and Inputs
Thelwall, Mike
Digital Libraries
Artificial Intelligence
Evaluating the quality of academic journal articles is a time consuming but critical task for national research evaluation exercises, appointments and promotion. It is therefore important to investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can play a role in this process. This article assesses which ChatGPT inputs (full text without tables, figures and references; title and abstract; title only) produce better quality score estimates, and the extent to which scores are affected by ChatGPT models and system prompts. The results show that the optimal input is the article title and abstract, with average ChatGPT scores based on these (30 iterations on a dataset of 51 papers) correlating at 0.67 with human scores, the highest ever reported. ChatGPT 4o is slightly better than 3.5-turbo (0.66), and 4o-mini (0.66). The results suggest that article full texts might confuse LLM research quality evaluations, even though complex system instructions for the task are more effective than simple ones. Thus, whilst abstracts contain insufficient information for a thorough assessment of rigour, they may contain strong pointers about originality and significance. Finally, linear regression can be used to convert the model scores into the human scale scores, which is 31% more accurate than guessing.
title Evaluating Research Quality with Large Language Models: An Analysis of ChatGPT's Effectiveness with Different Settings and Inputs
topic Digital Libraries
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06752