AgentSLR: Automating Systematic Literature Reviews in Epidemiology with Agentic AI

arXiv cs.AI / 3/25/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper presents AgentSLR, an open-source agentic AI pipeline that uses large language models to automate systematic literature reviews in epidemiology from retrieval through screening, data extraction, and report synthesis.
  • In experiments on epidemiological reviews for nine WHO-designated priority pathogens, AgentSLR reportedly matches expert-curated ground truth performance while cutting end-to-end review time from about 7 weeks to around 20 hours (~58× speed-up).
  • A benchmark across five frontier models suggests that SLR performance depends more on each model’s distinctive capabilities than on model size or inference cost alone.
  • The authors include human-in-the-loop validation to identify key failure modes, highlighting where agentic automation may still need supervision.
  • Overall, the study argues that agentic AI can substantially accelerate specialized scientific evidence synthesis, potentially reducing bottlenecks for evidence-based policy.

Abstract

Systematic literature reviews are essential for synthesizing scientific evidence but are costly, difficult to scale and time-intensive, creating bottlenecks for evidence-based policy. We study whether large language models can automate the complete systematic review workflow, from article retrieval, article screening, data extraction to report synthesis. Applied to epidemiological reviews of nine WHO-designated priority pathogens and validated against expert-curated ground truth, our open-source agentic pipeline (AgentSLR) achieves performance comparable to human researchers while reducing review time from approximately 7 weeks to 20 hours (a 58x speed-up). Our comparison of five frontier models reveals that performance on SLR is driven less by model size or inference cost than by each model's distinctive capabilities. Through human-in-the-loop validation, we identify key failure modes. Our results demonstrate that agentic AI can substantially accelerate scientific evidence synthesis in specialised domains.