A Preliminary Checklist (METRICS) to Standardize the Design and Reporting of Studies on Generative Artificial Intelligence–Based Models in Health Care Education and Practice: Development Study Involving a Literature Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Adherence to evidence-based practice is indispensable in health care. Recently, the utility of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models in health care has been evaluated extensively. However, the lack of consensus guidelines on the design and reporting of findings of these studies poses a challenge for the interpretation and synthesis of evidence. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to develop a preliminary checklist to standardize the reporting of generative AI-based studies in health care education and practice. METHODS: A literature review was conducted in Scopus, PubMed, and Google Scholar. Published records with "ChatGPT," "Bing," or "Bard" in the title were retrieved. Careful examination of the methodologies employed in the included records was conducted to identify the common pertinent themes and the possible gaps in reporting. A panel discussion was held to establish a unified and thorough checklist for the reporting of AI studies in health care. The finalized checklist was used to evaluate the included records by 2 independent raters. Cohen κ was used as the method to evaluate the interrater reliability. RESULTS: The final data set that formed the basis for pertinent theme identification and analysis comprised a total of 34 records. The finalized checklist included 9 pertinent themes collectively referred to as METRICS (Model, Evaluation, Timing, Range/Randomization, Individual factors, Count, and Specificity of prompts and language). Their details are as follows: (1) Model used and its exact settings; (2) Evaluation approach for the generated content; (3) Timing of testing the model; (4) Transparency of the data source; (5) Range of tested topics; (6) Randomization of selecting the queries; (7) Individual factors in selecting the queries and interrater reliability; (8) Count of queries executed to test the model; and (9) Specificity of the prompts and language used. The overall mean METRICS score was 3.0 (SD 0.58). The tested METRICS score was acceptable, with the range of Cohen κ of 0.558 to 0.962 (P<.001 for the 9 tested items). With classification per item, the highest average METRICS score was recorded for the "Model" item, followed by the "Specificity" item, while the lowest scores were recorded for the "Randomization" item (classified as suboptimal) and "Individual factors" item (classified as satisfactory). CONCLUSIONS: The METRICS checklist can facilitate the design of studies guiding researchers toward best practices in reporting results. The findings highlight the need for standardized reporting algorithms for generative AI-based studies in health care, considering the variability observed in methodologies and reporting. The proposed METRICS checklist could be a preliminary helpful base to establish a universally accepted approach to standardize the design and reporting of generative AI-based studies in health care, which is a swiftly evolving research topic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.403 | 0.575 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.045 | 0.027 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".