[paper] How Objective is Peer Review?

By Hannah Bast 

November 18, 2020

In 2014, the organizers of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS, then still called NIPS) made an interesting experiment.1 They split their program committee (PC) in two and let each half independently review a bit more than half of the submissions. That way, 10% of all submissions (166 papers) were reviewed by two independent PCs. The aimed at acceptance rate per PC was 23%. The result of the experiment was that among these 166 papers, the set of accepted papers from the two PCs overlapped by only 43%. That is, more than half of the papers accepted by one PC were rejected by the other. This led to a passionate flare-up of the old debate of how effective or random peer-reviewing really is and what we should do about it. [read more...]

My bottom line: The reputation of the peer review process is tarnished. Let us work on this with the same love and attention we give to our favorite research problems. Let us do more experiments to gain insights that help us make the process more fair and regain some trust. And let us create powerful incentives, so that whatever we already know is good is actually implemented and carried over from one PC to the next.

References: 

1 https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/181996-the-nips-experiment provides a short description of the NIPS experiment and various links to further analyses and discussions.

2 https://github.com/ad-freiburg/esa2018-experiment

3 There are other experiments, like the single-blind vs. double-blind experiment at WSDM'17, which investigated a particular aspect of the reviewing process: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00502

Hannah Bast is a professor of computer science at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Before that, she was working at Google, developing the public transit routing algorithm for Google Maps. Right after the ESA experiment, she became Dean of the Faculty of Engineering in Freiburg and a member of the Enquete Commission for Artificial Intelligence of the German parliament (Bundestag). That's why it took her two years to write this blog post.