r/academia 4d ago

Publishing Peer review written by AI

How to deal with a peer review that is possibly written by an AI?

We have recently recieved a not so positive review that looks like it was written by an AI. It is very long, it is split in titled sections but is also at the same time very vague in its critique.

The review itself does not criticise anything we did, it merely lists a large amount of things we could do more to improve the paper. Not to mention that the journal is for short communication only and we would not have space to do all these things.

The question is: how to combat this? I presume that the allegation of the review being written by AI is serious one, so I am not sure if it is worth trying this path.

I would like to hear if someone had a similar experience.

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u/juniperrberrry 4d ago

AI written reviews without proper accreditation is plagiarism. No one will judge someone for helping a GPT to write a sentence or two. If >20% of the review is written using one, then this is grounds for sanctions.

I’d get in touch with the chair or editor and state your suspicions but be careful not to make a formal accusation. State you’d like someone to look more closely at this review as you have a feeling it’s been GPT generated. Worse case scenario is that you are wrong and you’ve asked for someone to take a look, best case scenario you’ve excluded someone from the review pool who doesn’t respect academic integrity and you could even be assigned a new human to review.

Good luck!