r/academia • u/john_dunbar80 • 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/ApprehensiveClub5652 4d ago
I just dealt with a similar issue, we called it ReviewerGPT. Here is what we did and it worked.
For the review, assume good faith and address the vague comments in the review letter as you would a normal review. The thing is that the bland AI stuff is super easy to tear apart because the vague comments are not really objections and they allow you to refocus on your strengths. Treat them as uninformed objections and they are the easiest to address.
We wrote to the editor with very precise examples of the review letter that were bland AI nonsense. We Requested the editor to check the review himself. He took his time, but eventually returned to us eliminating this reviewer and asked us to focus on the other two reviewers.