Novelty is a crucial criterion in the peer review process for evaluating academic papers. Traditionally, it's judged by experts or measure by unique reference combinations. Both methods have limitations: experts have limited knowledge, and the effectiveness of the combination method is uncertain. Moreover, it's unclear if unique citations truly measure novelty. The large language model (LLM) possesses a wealth of knowledge, while human experts possess judgment abilities that the LLM does not possess. Therefore, our research integrates the knowledge and abilities of LLM and human experts to address the limitations of novelty assessment. One of the most common types of novelty in academic papers is the introduction of new methods. In this paper, we propose leveraging human knowledge and LLM to assist pretrained language models (PLMs, e.g. BERT etc.) in predicting the method novelty of papers. Specifically, we extract sentences related to the novelty of the academic paper from peer review reports and use LLM to summarize the methodology section of the academic paper, which are then used to fine-tune PLMs. In addition, we have designed a text-guided fusion module with novel Sparse-Attention to better integrate human and LLM knowledge. We compared the method we proposed with a large number of baselines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance.

Peer review is vital in academia for evaluating research quality. Top AI conferences use reviewer confidence scores to ensure review reliability, but existing studies lack fine-grained analysis of text-score consistency, potentially missing key details. This work assesses consistency at word, sentence, and aspect levels using deep learning and NLP conference review data. We employ deep learning to detect hedge sentences and aspects, then analyze report length, hedge word/sentence frequency, aspect mentions, and sentiment to evaluate text-score alignment. Correlation, significance, and regression tests examine confidence scores' impact on paper outcomes. Results show high text-score consistency across all levels, with regression revealing higher confidence scores correlate with paper rejection, validating expert assessments and peer review fairness.

For Reviewer #1's concern about making theory, I tend to be open-minded since I can not find solid evidence that the paper is making theory only. For Reviewer #4's comment about the over-claim of the result the paper proved, my take is follows. First, for many problems, the true local minima enjoys the flat basin. A famous example I have is the following paper: McGoff, Kevin A., et al. "The Local Edge Machine: inference of dynamic models of gene regulation." Second, the authors have explained the motivation of using the Levy process to model the noise.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted human society, influencing various domains. Among them, academia is not simply a domain affected by LLMs, but it is also the pivotal force in the development of LLMs. In academic publications, this phenomenon is represented during the incorporation of LLMs into the peer review mechanism for reviewing manuscripts. We proposed the concept of automated scholarly paper review (ASPR) in our previous paper. As the incorporation grows, it now enters the coexistence phase of ASPR and peer review, which is described in that paper. LLMs hold transformative potential for the full-scale implementation of ASPR, but they also pose new issues and challenges that need to be addressed. In this survey paper, we aim to provide a holistic view of ASPR in the era of LLMs. We begin with a survey to find out which LLMs are used to conduct ASPR. Then, we review what ASPR-related technological bottlenecks have been solved with the incorporation of LLM technology. After that, we move on to explore new methods, new datasets, new source code, and new online systems that come with LLMs for ASPR. Furthermore, we summarize the performance and issues of LLMs in ASPR, and investigate the attitudes and reactions of publishers and academia to ASPR. Lastly, we discuss the challenges associated with the development of LLMs for ASPR. We hope this survey can serve as an inspirational reference for the researchers and promote the progress of ASPR for its actual implementation.

The number of scientific articles produced every year is growing rapidly. Providing quality control over them is crucial for scientists and, ultimately, for the public good. In modern science, this process is largely delegated to peer review -- a distributed procedure in which each submission is evaluated by several independent experts in the field. Peer review is widely used, yet it is hard, time-consuming, and prone to error. Since the artifacts involved in peer review -- manuscripts, reviews, discussions -- are largely text-based, Natural Language Processing has great potential to improve reviewing. As the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has enabled NLP assistance for many new tasks, the discussion on machine-assisted peer review is picking up the pace. Yet, where exactly is help needed, where can NLP help, and where should it stand aside? The goal of our paper is to provide a foundation for the future efforts in NLP for peer-reviewing assistance. We discuss peer review as a general process, exemplified by reviewing at AI conferences. We detail each step of the process from manuscript submission to camera-ready revision, and discuss the associated challenges and opportunities for NLP assistance, illustrated by existing work. We then turn to the big challenges in NLP for peer review as a whole, including data acquisition and licensing, operationalization and experimentation, and ethical issues. To help consolidate community efforts, we create a companion repository that aggregates key datasets pertaining to peer review. Finally, we issue a detailed call for action for the scientific community, NLP and AI researchers, policymakers, and funding bodies to help bring the research in NLP for peer review forward. We hope that our work will help set the agenda for research in machine-assisted scientific quality control in the age of AI, within the NLP community and beyond.

Peer review constitutes a core component of scholarly publishing; yet it demands substantial expertise and training, and is susceptible to errors and biases. Various applications of NLP for peer reviewing assistance aim to support reviewers in this complex process, but the lack of clearly licensed datasets and multi-domain corpora prevent the systematic study of NLP for peer review. To remedy this, we introduce NLPeer -- the first ethically sourced multidomain corpus of more than 5k papers and 11k review reports from five different venues. In addition to the new datasets of paper drafts, camera-ready versions and peer reviews from the NLP community, we establish a unified data representation and augment previous peer review datasets to include parsed and structured paper representations, rich metadata and versioning information. We complement our resource with implementations and analysis of three reviewing assistance tasks, including a novel guided skimming task. Our work paves the path towards systematic, multi-faceted, evidence-based study of peer review in NLP and beyond. The data and code are publicly available.

The shift towards publicly available text sources has enabled language processing at unprecedented scale, yet leaves under-serviced the domains where public and openly licensed data is scarce. Proactively collecting text data for research is a viable strategy to address this scarcity, but lacks systematic methodology taking into account the many ethical, legal and confidentiality-related aspects of data collection. Our work presents a case study on proactive data collection in peer review -- a challenging and under-resourced NLP domain. We outline ethical and legal desiderata for proactive data collection and introduce "Yes-Yes-Yes", the first donation-based peer reviewing data collection workflow that meets these requirements. We report on the implementation of Yes-Yes-Yes at ACL Rolling Review and empirically study the implications of proactive data collection for the dataset size and the biases induced by the donation behavior on the peer reviewing platform.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore which structures of academic articles referees would pay more attention to, what specific content referees focus on, and whether the distribution of PRC is related to the citations. Design/methodology/approach Firstly, utilizing the feature words of section title and hierarchical attention network model (HAN) to identify the academic article structures. Secondly, analyzing the distribution of PRC in different structures according to the position information extracted by rules in PRC. Thirdly, analyzing the distribution of feature words of PRC extracted by the Chi-square test and TF-IDF in different structures. Finally, four correlation analysis methods are used to analyze whether the distribution of PRC in different structures is correlated to the citations. Findings The count of PRC distributed in Materials and Methods and Results section is significantly more than that in the structure of Introduction and Discussion, indicating that referees pay more attention to the Material and Methods and Results. The distribution of feature words of PRC in different structures is obviously different, which can reflect the content of referees' concern. There is no correlation between the distribution of PRC in different structures and the citations. Research limitations/implications Due to the differences in the way referees write peer review reports, the rules used to extract position information cannot cover all PRC. Originality/value The paper finds a pattern in the distribution of PRC in different academic article structures proving the long-term empirical understanding. It also provides insight into academic article writing: researchers should ensure the scientificity of methods and the reliability of results when writing academic article to obtain a high degree of recognition from referees.

The journal impact factor (JIF) is often equated with journal quality and the quality of the peer review of the papers submitted to the journal. We examined the association between the content of peer review and JIF by analysing 10,000 peer review reports submitted to 1,644 medical and life sciences journals. Two researchers hand-coded a random sample of 2,000 sentences. We then trained machine learning models to classify all 187,240 sentences as contributing or not contributing to content categories. We examined the association between ten groups of journals defined by JIF deciles and the content of peer reviews using linear mixed-effects models, adjusting for the length of the review. The JIF ranged from 0.21 to 74.70. The length of peer reviews increased from the lowest (median number of words 185) to the JIF group (387 words). The proportion of sentences allocated to different content categories varied widely, even within JIF groups. For thoroughness, sentences on 'Materials and Methods' were more common in the highest JIF journals than in the lowest JIF group (difference of 7.8 percentage points; 95% CI 4.9 to 10.7%). The trend for 'Presentation and Reporting' went in the opposite direction, with the highest JIF journals giving less emphasis to such content (difference -8.9%; 95% CI -11.3 to -6.5%). For helpfulness, reviews for higher JIF journals devoted less attention to 'Suggestion and Solution' and provided fewer Examples than lower impact factor journals. No, or only small differences were evident for other content categories. In conclusion, peer review in journals with higher JIF tends to be more thorough in discussing the methods used but less helpful in terms of suggesting solutions and providing examples. Differences were modest and variability high, indicating that the JIF is a bad predictor for the quality of peer review of an individual manuscript.