AI peer reviewers unleashed to ease publishing grind

Automated tools could help take the slog out of peer review.Credit: Mary Evans/Classicstock/H. Armstrong Roberts Most researchers have good reason to grumble about peer review: it is time-consuming and error-prone, and the workload is unevenly spread, with just 20% of scientists taking on most reviews. Now peer review by artificial intelligence (AI) is promising to improve the process, boost the quality of published papers -- and save reviewers time. A handful of academic publishers are piloting AI tools to do anything from selecting reviewers to checking statistics and summarizing a paper's findings. In June, software called StatReviewer, which checks that statistics and methods in manuscripts are sound, was adopted by Aries Systems, a peer-review management system owned by Amsterdam-based publishing giant Elsevier. And ScholarOne, a peer-review platform used by many journals, is teaming up with UNSILO of Aarhus, Denmark, which uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyse manuscripts.