Scalable Scientific Interest Profiling Using Large Language Models

Abstract: Research profiles help surface scientists' expertise but are often outdated. We develop and evaluate two LLM-based methods to generate scientific interest profiles: one summarizing PubMed abstracts and one using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, and compare them with researchers' self-written profiles. We assembled titles, MeSH terms, and abstracts for 595 faculty at Columbia University Irving Medical Center; self-authored profiles were available for 167. Using GPT-4o-mini, we generated profiles and assessed them with automatic metrics and blinded human review. Lexical overlap with self-written profiles was low (ROUGE-L, BLEU, METEOR), while BERTScore indicated moderate semantic similarity (F1: 0.542 for MeSH-based; 0.555 for abstract-based). Paraphrased references yielded 0.851, highlighting metric sensitivity. TF-IDF Kullback-Leibler divergence (8.56 for MeSH-based; 8.58 for abstract-based) suggested distinct keyword choices. In manual review, 77.78 percent of MeSH-based profiles were rated good or excellent, readability was favored in 93.44 percent of cases, and panelists preferred MeSH-based over abstract-based profiles in 67.86 percent of comparisons. Overall, LLMs can generate researcher profiles at scale; MeSH-derived profiles tend to be more readable than abstract-derived ones. Machine-generated and self-written profiles differ conceptually, with human summaries introducing more novel ideas.