AI evidence extraction

Can AI Be a Good Peer Reviewer? A Survey of Peer Review Process, Evaluation, and the Future

Sihong Wu, Owen Jiang, Yilun Zhao, Tiansheng Hu, Yiling Ma, Kaiyan Zhang et al. · ArXiv.org · 2026

AI-generated evidence extraction, verified across multiple analytical personas. Not a substitute for the peer-reviewed original.

10/10

Relevance

Evidence

Citations

0.00

FWCI

Methodology & findings

Study design

Systematic narrative review with taxonomy construction.

Main result

The survey identifies a transformative shift in peer review driven by large language models and agent-based systems. Key findings include: "Around 2023, models began to process full manuscripts and produce credible end-to-end reviews" and "Current systems go beyond single-prompt generation to adopt multi-agent designs that emulate panel workflows and reinforcement learning to align outputs with nuanced human preferences." The paper reveals that "evaluation must keep pace" with methodological advances, establishing a taxonomy of five evaluation paradigms: human-centric, reference-based, LLM-based, aspect-oriented, and task-based evaluations.

Reports effect sizes.

Research paradigm

Interpretive/Systematic Literature Review

Author conclusions

"The landscape of peer review process has undergone a transformative shift, driven by advances in large language models and latest paradigms. This survey has provided a comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art methods, spanning review generation as well as after-review tasks including rebuttal, meta-review, and revision. We also present a systematic taxonomy of evaluation methods, metrics and datasets. Despite remarkable improvements in generation methods, significant challenges remain, including robust content-level evaluation and extensive capabilities. As the field advances, future research must prioritize transparent and ethical deployment of automated reviews."

Risk of bias

Domain concentration bias: Majority of datasets and evaluation studies concentrated in NLP and ML venues, not generalizable to other fields; Publication bias: Survey limited to publicly accessible literature; proprietary systems and unpublished advances not represented; Temporal bias: Rapid progress may outdated analyses soon after publication; Selection bias: Limited coverage of non-NLP/ML scientific domains; Temporal bias: rapid pace of LLM development may render findings outdated quickly; LLM judge biases: position bias, verbosity bias, style preference in LLM-based evaluations; Affiliation bias: studies show LLMs can exhibit favoritism toward highly-ranked institutions in single-blinded settings

Limitations

"While this survey strives to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the peer review landscape, several limitations remain
First, the rapid pace of progress in large language models, agent-based systems, and evaluation protocols means that new methodologies and benchmarks may emerge soon after publication, potentially outdating some of our analyses
Second, the majority of available datasets and evaluation studies are concentrated in NLP and machine learning domains, limiting the generalizability of our findings to other scientific fields
Finally, our survey is based on publicly accessible literature and resources
proprietary systems or unpublished industrial advances may not be adequately represented."

Open questions raised

Novelty Evaluation: LLMs remain weak at judging true novelty and distinguishing incremental from groundbreaking work
Automated Evaluation: Review quality remains hard to quantify
better content-aware evaluation methods needed
Beyond NLP and AI Domains: Most datasets concentrated in NLP/ML
broader disciplinary coverage needed
Beyond Review Generation: Automation of rebuttal, meta-review, and paper revision tasks remains underexplored

Data: PEERREAD [Kang et al., 2018]; NLPEER [Dycke et al., 2023a]; ReviewMT [Tan et al., 2024]; MOPRD [Lin et al., 2022]; PEERSUM [Li et al., 2023]; NovBench [Wu et al., 2026b]; RR-MCQ [Zhou et al., 2024a]; Re2 [Zhang et al., 2025a]Extracted from: pdf

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