The Application of Artificial Intelligence Technologies as a Substitute for Reading and to Support and Enhance the Authoring of Scientific Review Articles

To gain a comprehensive overview of new scientific findings with the enormous, ever-increasing amount of published information, we apply a new combinatorial approach that complements the process of reading scientific articles by supplementing artificial intelligence technologies. We present a combinatorial approach, which we illustrate in the form of a “double funnel of artificial intelligence.” Our approach suggests to largely increase the amount of data at the beginning of the data collection process and to subsequently clean and enrich the data set in order to gain much more knowledge at the end of the procedure compared to a “classical” literature review. We use natural language processing and text visualization techniques to uncover findings that are generally unbeknown to the human reader due to the inability to process very large amounts of text. By illustrating the individual steps using practical examples taken from use cases, we demonstrate the merits of our approach. With our methodology, we are able to reproduce findings from “regular” review papers; however, we discover additional and new findings in different fields, such as data science or medicine. We also point out the limitations of our approach. Finally, we make suggestions as to how the methodology could be further developed.