Health Research is Time-Consuming and Expensive, but Machine Learning Could Change That

From climate change to opioid addiction, we are facing serious public health crises that put our research and data management experts to the test. When it comes to scientific evidence, systematic literature reviews--painstaking assessments of all the literature ever produced on a given subject--are often regarded as the gold standard. Though no research method is foolproof, says Vox health correspondent Julia Belluz, "these studies represent the best available syntheses of global evidence about the likely effects of different decisions, therapies and policies." That comprehensiveness comes at high price, though, in terms of time and money. It involves sifting through enormous volumes of literature--sometimes hundreds of thousands of scientific abstracts--stored in academic databases.