Systematic Literature Reviews With Two Multi-Agentic Systems And Human-In-The-Loop

Abstract

Systematic literature review of clinical trials drives regulatory decision-making, but conventional screening and extraction are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and vulnerable to study selection bias. We propose two fit-to-purpose multi-agentic systems (MAS) for systematic literature review, with human-in-the-loop. The screening MAS uses multiple LLM agents with heterogeneous personas and multiround cross-review, and uniformly improves accuracy over a single-LLM baseline. The extraction MAS combines standardization, an iterative correction loop, and retrieval-based context control to ensure accuracy and scalability. Both MAS are specifically designed to support Human-In-The-Loop which is essential for clinical decisions. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the system architecture rather than in any single foundation tools: the system can naturally benefit from future improvements in the underlying tools, for instance, stronger LLM agents, retrieval engines, image recognition methods, etc. As a real-world application, a published network meta-analysis is reproduced by the MAS. The result recovers all trials from the original study and identifies additional eligible trials missed by manual review, leading to updated clinical conclusions.