‘Honestly, i could lose a few hours on PubMed quite easily’: breaking down the reading barriers of medical literature with an LLM-powered browser extension

Scientific literature is a primary source of validated information. Sometimes, however, the complicated field-specific language and terminology act as barriers to understanding the insights. This is also true for the societally significant medical field. With the recent rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be useful in mitigating these issues. We implemented a browser extension (SimpliMed) to simplify PubMed abstracts with GPT-4 (implemented by ChatGPT API) to make medical literature more accessible to wider audiences and tested it with a user study. Our results indicate that SimpliMed was effective in simplifying medical article abstracts and helped support understanding, discovering new knowledge, and developing critical thinking skills. Our findings contribute to the understanding of tools with LLMs to simplify medical literature. We shed light on its multiple implications that extend beyond the immediate scope of medical literature simplification, including fighting misinformation and future education.