Search

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to assist with systematic literature reviews (SLRs) is expanding rapidly, yet researchers still lack structured frameworks for assessing and incorporating these tools into their research practices. This paper introduces and implements a rubric-based framework designed to evaluate AI toolchains across essential SLR stages, such as literature searching, screening, and data synthesis. A mixed-methods study was executed with 63 postgraduate student researchers, who represent the early-stage investigators that serve as primary adopters of these digital workflows. The results demonstrate that workflows structured around the rubric enhanced the participants' perceived utility of AI utilities, provided organized criteria for comparative analysis, and promoted greater transparency during tool selection. Although formal indicators of inter-rater reliability (such as Cohen’s or Fleiss’ Kappa) were not calculated due to the fact that participants did not evaluate identical benchmark sets concurrently, the consistency of the rubric was qualitatively validated through pilot evaluations, iterative updates, and structured focus group discussions. These efforts confirm interpretative alignment among users while recognizing that future validation via independent assessors is required. This research contributes a validated assessment rubric, an operational example of an AI-augmented SLR workflow, and a discussion regarding the consequences for research training, study reproducibility, and cross-disciplinary translation.

Artificial intelligence increasingly informs consequential decisions, yet high predictive performance alone does not establish that an intelligent system is worthy of trust. This systematic review examines trustworthy AI as a multidimensional, socio-technical, and lifecycle-dependent research domain. It synthesises selected peer-reviewed journal evidence addressing transparency, interpretability, explainability, robustness, safety, privacy, security, fairness, accountability, governance, and meaningful human oversight. The review applies predefined questions, eligibility principles, trustworthiness-dimension mapping, claim-level evidence extraction, and cross-dimensional synthesis without undertaking meta-analysis or inventing quantitative screening results. The evidence indicates that transparency and explanation must be assessed in relation to fidelity, stability, completeness, usefulness, stakeholder needs, contestability, recourse, and the practical authority of human overseers. Robustness and safety require evaluation under adversarial conditions, uncertainty, context shift, system failure, and residual risk, while privacy-preserving approaches must still be examined for leakage, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and governance limitations. Fairness depends on context-sensitive definitions, bias identification, distributional consequences, documentation, responsibility allocation, auditability, and institutional mechanisms for correction. Cross-dimensional analysis reveals persistent tensions between transparency and privacy, explainability and security, automation and human control, and performance and fairness. Important gaps remain in multidimensional evaluation, realistic human-oversight studies, explanation-usefulness validation, lifecycle monitoring, accountability operationalisation, stakeholder participation, and foundation-model assurance. The review contributes an integrated evidence synthesis showing that AI worthiness of trust should be supported through coordinated technical validation, human-centred assessment, institutional governance, and continuing monitoring rather than inferred from any isolated property.