AI-aided Systematic Review to Create a Database with Potentially Relevant Papers on Depression, Anxiety, and Addiction

Abstract

It is of utmost importance to provide an overview and strength of evidence of predictive factors and to investigate the current state of affairs on evidence for all published and hypothesized factors that contribute to the onset, relapse, and maintenance of anxiety-, substance use-, and depressive disorders. Thousands of such articles have been published on potential factors of CMDs, yet a clear overview of all preceding factors and interaction between factors is missing. Therefore, the main aim of the current project was to create a database with potentially relevant papers obtained via a systematic. The current paper describes every step of the process of constructing the database, from search query to database. After a broad search and cleaning of the data, we used active learning using a shallow classifier and labeled the first set of papers. Then, we applied a second screening phase in which we switched to a different active learning model (i.e., a neural net) to identify difficult-to-find papers due to concept ambiguity. In the third round of screening, we checked for incorrectly included/excluded papers in a quality assessment procedure resulting in the final database. All scripts, data files, and output files of the software are available via Zenodo (for Github code), the Open Science Framework (for protocols, output), and DANS (for the datasets) and are referred to in the specific sections, thereby making the project fully reproducible.