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More Papers Led the Evidence Bot Astray
Deeper retrieval raised false-positive conclusions on null-effect biomedical questions.
Summary
Deeper retrieval raised false-positive conclusions on null-effect biomedical questions.
A study of automated biomedical evidence search found that publication bias can turn deeper retrieval into worse causal inference. On 140 held-out Cochrane-derived questions, the reported false-positive drift on null-effect cases rose from 7.9% to 15.7% as retrieval budgets grew from three to 20 steps. The authors model the effect and propose a causal-graph agent with a stopping policy that watches for convergence and declining process quality. These are benchmark and model results; they do not establish that any clinical treatment works or fails.
Why it matters
Deeper retrieval raised false-positive conclusions on null-effect biomedical questions.
Limits and context
- These are benchmark and model results; they do not establish that any clinical treatment works or fails.
Key claims
Deeper retrieval raised false-positive conclusions on null-effect biomedical questions.
Qualification: These are benchmark and model results; they do not establish that any clinical treatment works or fails.
Evidence: source-2026-09-22-004
Sources
- arXiv preprint 2609.24101arXiv · primary research
Corrections
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