AgentReview: Exploring Peer Review Dynamics with LLM Agents

Nov 12, 2024ยท
Yiqiao Jin*
,
Qinlin Zhao*
Yiyang "Diana" Wang
Yiyang "Diana" Wang
,
Hao Chen
,
Kaijie Zhu
,
Yijia Xiao
,
Jindong Wang
ยท 1 min read
Diagram of the AgentReview framework: reviewer, author, and area-chair agents simulating peer review. AgentReview simulation framework overview (adapted from Figure 1 of the paper).
Abstract
Peer review is fundamental to the integrity and advancement of scientific publication. Traditional methods of peer review analyses often rely on exploration and statistics of existing peer review data, which do not adequately address the multivariate nature of the process, account for the latent variables, and are further constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data. We introduce AgentReview, the first large language model (LLM) based peer review simulation framework, which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. Our study reveals significant insights, including a notable 37.1% variation in paper decisions due to reviewers’ biases, supported by sociological theories such as the social influence theory, altruism fatigue, and authority bias. We believe that this study could offer valuable insights to improve the design of peer review mechanisms.
Type
Publication
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024), Main Track โ€” Oral

Abstract

Peer review is fundamental to the integrity and advancement of scientific publication. Traditional methods of peer review analyses often rely on exploration and statistics of existing peer review data, which do not adequately address the multivariate nature of the process, account for the latent variables, and are further constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data. We introduce AgentReview, the first large language model (LLM) based peer review simulation framework, which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. Our study reveals significant insights, including a notable 37.1% variation in paper decisions due to reviewers’ biases, supported by sociological theories such as the social influence theory, altruism fatigue, and authority bias. We believe that this study could offer valuable insights to improve the design of peer review mechanisms.

Keywords

Large Language Models, Peer Review, LLM Agents, Academic Publishing