Can we save peer-review quality?
What is Peer-review
Peer-review is a corner-stone in scientific research. It serves a quality check for scientific drafts. It is formally defined as: Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work.
Why is it important
It’s important as, only after an article passes peer review can it be officially published, and it’s the knowledge shared with the scientific community and the world.
Current state of Peer-reivew
Peer review requires human experts, therefore, it scales poorly, particularly, with the rapid increase of submitted articles. This leads to an increased reviewing load, with reviewers having limited time to review papers (leading to poor and noisy feedback) and authors having to wait (and revise their work often) before it can be published.
This leads to a degrading quality of reviews. Authors are faced with one-liner reviews like Why haven't you evaluated more baselines, and more datasets
.
Therefore, making reviewers more efficient (writing reviews faster) and effective (writing better reviews) is crucial to scale peer reviewing.
What can we do?
We aim to support reviews by developing a system that can evaluate and improve their feedback. Specifically, given a human-written (or generated) draft review, our goal is to evaluate its feedback according to defined aspects and automatically re-write the feedback so that it improves on the desired aspects and is eventually more helpful to authors.