arXiv Computation and Language

Is Peer Review Really in Decline? Analyzing Review Quality across Venues and Time

The paper investigates whether peer review quality is declining by developing a framework for evidence-based comparison across venues and time. It applies this framework to major AI and machine learning conferences—ICLR, NeurIPS, and ACL—documenting diverse review formats and proposing a multi-dimensional schema that combines LLM-based and lightweight metrics. The study finds no consistent decline in median review quality over time, offering alternative explanations and recommendations for future empirical research.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 4

AI-Assisted Peer Review Across Research Communities: From Reviewer AI Policies to LLM Review Quality

AI-assisted peer review is increasingly discussed and adopted as a tool to support the scientific publishing process, yet there is little systematic understanding of how publication venues regulate its use or of how capable current AI review systems are. We address these questions by first surveying reviewer-facing AI policies across 111 leading AI/NLP conferences and medical journals, revealing substantial regulation differences between the two communities.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

AI-Assisted Peer Review Across Research Communities: From Reviewer AI Policies to LLM Review Quality

arXiv:2608. 03581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted peer review is increasingly discussed and adopted as a tool to support the scientific publishing process, yet there is little systematic understanding of how publication venues regulate its use or of how capable current AI review systems are.

By Alexander M. Fichtl, Lukas Ellinger, Josefin Kelber, Kry\v{s}tof Ol\'ik, Georg Groh
arXiv AI
2d ago

Learning Checklists to Reduce Lottery Effects in Scientific Peer Review

The paper introduces a method to mitigate reviewer lottery error in scientific peer review by generating checklists of criticisms from historical review data. These checklists are organized into a tree of coarsenings, and the optimal coarsening is chosen to maximize correlated agreement among reviewers. Experiments on NeurIPS 2021 and ICLR 2022 data show that the learned checklists significantly reduce mean squared error in simulated and human review settings.

By Xuanyou Liu, Ziyang Guo, Jason Hartline, Jessica Hullman
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Beyond Imitation: A Framework and Benchmark for LLM-Assisted Peer Review

The paper introduces a verification‑centric framework and benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) as assistants in peer review, focusing on error detection rather than imitation of human reviews. It presents a scalable benchmark that injects synthetic errors into conference papers to test LLMs’ ability to spot logical contradictions, and proposes a Multi‑Layered Review (MLR) framework that emphasizes deep manuscript comprehension before generating reviews. Experiments show the approach aligns well with human review scores, excels at error detection, and offers complementary reviewer insights, while also revealing vulnerabilities to adversarial manipulation.

By Rachel S. Y. Teo, Yutaro Yamada, Shashank Kotyan, Yuki Imajuku, Tarin Clanuwat
arXiv AI
Jun 24

Policies Permitting LLM Use for Polishing Peer Reviews Are Currently Not Enforceable

arXiv:2603. 20450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A number of scientific conferences and journals have recently enacted policies that prohibit LLM usage by peer reviewers, except for polishing, paraphrasing, and grammar correction of otherwise human-written reviews.

By Rounak Saha, Gurusha Juneja, Dayita Chaudhuri, Naveeja Sajeevan, Nihar B Shah, Danish Pruthi
arXiv AI
Aug 28

FIRSTPASS: A Multi-Domain, Multi-Round Peer Review Dataset Grounded in Real Editorial Outcomes

FIRSTPASS is a large-scale peer review dataset that captures complete multi-round editorial dialogues from a multidisciplinary high-impact journal, Nature Communications. It contains 3,668 records across five scientific domains—biology, chemistry, neuroscience, physics, and earth science—encompassing initial referee reports, author responses, and updated reviewer assessments. Each record is labeled with an outcome (STANDARD or EXTENDED) based on editorial decisions, and the dataset includes detailed parsing pipelines and evaluation scripts for reproducible AI benchmarking.

By Prabhjot Singh, Somnath Luitel, Manmeet Singh, Josh Durkee