A suite of automated tools is now available to assist with peer review but humans are still in the driver’s seat.
Most researchers have good reason to grumble about peer review: it is time-consuming and error-prone, and the workload is unevenly spread, with just 20% of scientists taking on most reviews.
Now peer review by artificial intelligence (AI) is promising to improve the process, boost the quality of published papers — and save reviewers time.
A handful of academic publishers are piloting AI tools to do anything from selecting reviewers to checking statistics and summarizing a paper’s findings.
