Automated MeSH term suggestion for effective query formulation in systematic reviews literature search

Abstract

• The introduction of the new task of suggesting MeSH terms for systematic review literature search, modelled within the context of an information specialist looking for MeSH terms to add to a Boolean query. • The formulation of MeSH term suggestion methods, based on pre-trained language models, to help information specialists and researchers to construct effective Boolean queries for systematic review creation. • An empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of different MeSH terms suggestion methods. • An understanding of how the MeSH term suggested by the proposed automatic methods differ from those MeSH terms originally selected by information specialists when formulating queries. High-quality medical systematic reviews require comprehensive literature searches to ensure the recommendations and outcomes are sufficiently reliable. Indeed, searching for relevant medical literature is a key phase in constructing systematic reviews and often involves domain (medical researchers) and search (information specialists) experts in developing the search queries. Queries in this context are highly complex, based on Boolean logic, include free-text terms and index terms from standardised terminologies (e.g., the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus), and are difficult and time-consuming to build. The use of MeSH terms, in particular, has been shown to improve the quality of the search results. However, identifying the correct MeSH terms to include in a query is difficult: information experts are often unfamiliar with the MeSH database and unsure about the appropriateness of MeSH terms for a query. Naturally, the full value of the MeSH terminology is often not fully exploited. This article investigates methods to suggest MeSH terms based on an initial Boolean query that includes only free-text terms. In this context, we devise lexical and pre-trained language models based methods. These methods promise to automatically identify highly effective MeSH terms for inclusion in a systematic review query. Our study contributes an empirical evaluation of several MeSH term suggestion methods. We further contribute an extensive analysis of MeSH term suggestions for each method and how these suggestions impact the effectiveness of Boolean queries.