Implicit and Explicit Research Quality Score Probabilities from ChatGPT

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Thelwall, Mike, Yang, Yunhan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915346751946752
author Thelwall, Mike
Yang, Yunhan
author_facet Thelwall, Mike
Yang, Yunhan
contents The large language model (LLM) ChatGPT's quality scores for journal articles correlate more strongly with human judgements than some citation-based indicators in most fields. Averaging multiple ChatGPT scores improves the results, apparently leveraging its internal probability model. To leverage these probabilities, this article tests two novel strategies: requesting percentage likelihoods for scores and extracting the probabilities of alternative tokens in the responses. The probability estimates were then used to calculate weighted average scores. Both strategies were evaluated with five iterations of ChatGPT 4o-mini on 96,800 articles submitted to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, using departmental average REF2021 quality scores as a proxy for article quality. The data was analysed separately for each of the 34 field-based REF Units of Assessment. For the first strategy, explicit requests for tables of score percentage likelihoods substantially decreased the value of the scores (lower correlation with the proxy quality indicator). In contrast, weighed averages of score token probabilities slightly increased the correlation with the quality proxy indicator and these probabilities reasonably accurately reflected ChatGPT's outputs. The token probability approach is therefore the most accurate method for ranking articles by research quality as well as being cheaper than comparable ChatGPT strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_13525
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Implicit and Explicit Research Quality Score Probabilities from ChatGPT
Thelwall, Mike
Yang, Yunhan
Digital Libraries
The large language model (LLM) ChatGPT's quality scores for journal articles correlate more strongly with human judgements than some citation-based indicators in most fields. Averaging multiple ChatGPT scores improves the results, apparently leveraging its internal probability model. To leverage these probabilities, this article tests two novel strategies: requesting percentage likelihoods for scores and extracting the probabilities of alternative tokens in the responses. The probability estimates were then used to calculate weighted average scores. Both strategies were evaluated with five iterations of ChatGPT 4o-mini on 96,800 articles submitted to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, using departmental average REF2021 quality scores as a proxy for article quality. The data was analysed separately for each of the 34 field-based REF Units of Assessment. For the first strategy, explicit requests for tables of score percentage likelihoods substantially decreased the value of the scores (lower correlation with the proxy quality indicator). In contrast, weighed averages of score token probabilities slightly increased the correlation with the quality proxy indicator and these probabilities reasonably accurately reflected ChatGPT's outputs. The token probability approach is therefore the most accurate method for ranking articles by research quality as well as being cheaper than comparable ChatGPT strategies.
title Implicit and Explicit Research Quality Score Probabilities from ChatGPT
topic Digital Libraries
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13525