Accelerating Disease Model Parameter Extraction: An LLM-Based Ranking Approach to Select Initial Studies for Literature Review Automation

As climate change transforms our environment and human intrusion into natural ecosystems escalates, there is a growing demand for disease spread models to forecast and plan for the next zoonotic disease outbreak. Accurate parametrization of these models requires data from diverse sources, including the scientific literature. Despite the abundance of scientific publications, the manual extraction of these data via systematic literature reviews remains a significant bottleneck, requiring extensive time and resources, and is susceptible to human error. This study examines the application of a large language model (LLM) as an assessor for screening prioritisation in climate-sensitive zoonotic disease research. By framing the selection criteria of articles as a question–answer task and utilising zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, the proposed method achieves a saving of at least 70% work effort compared to manual screening at a recall level of 95% (NWSS@95%). This was validated across four datasets containing four distinct zoonotic diseases and a critical climate variable (rainfall). The approach additionally produces explainable AI rationales for each ranked article. The effectiveness of the approach across multiple diseases demonstrates the potential for broad application in systematic literature reviews. The substantial reduction in screening effort, along with the provision of explainable AI rationales, marks an important step toward automated parameter extraction from the scientific literature.