Can ChatGPT Write a Good Boolean Query for Systematic Review Literature Search?

Systematic reviews are comprehensive literature reviews for a highly focused research question. These reviews are considered the highest form of evidence in medicine. Complex Boolean queries are developed as part of the systematic review creation process to retrieve literature, as they permit reproducibility and understandability. However, it is difficult and time-consuming to develop high-quality Boolean queries, often requiring the expertise of expert searchers like librarians. Recent advances in transformer-based generative models have shown their ability to effectively follow user instructions and generate answers based on these instructions. In this paper, we investigate ChatGPT as a means for…