A Novice-Reviewer Experiment to Address Scarcity of Qualified Reviewers in Large Conferences

Abstract

Conference peer review constitutes a human-computation process whose importance cannot be overstated: not only it identifies the best submissions for acceptance, but, ultimately, it impacts the future of the whole research area by promoting some ideas and restraining others. A surge in the number of submissions received by leading AI conferences has challenged the sustainability of the review process by increasing the burden on the pool of qualified reviewers which is growing at a much slower rate. In this work, we consider the problem of reviewer recruiting with a focus on the scarcity of qualified reviewers in large conferences. Specifically, we design a procedure for (i) recruiting reviewers from the population not typically covered by major conferences and (ii) guiding them through the reviewing pipeline. In conjunction with the ICML 2020 --- a large, top-tier machine learning conference --- we recruit a small set of reviewers through our procedure and compare their performance with the general population of ICML reviewers. Our experiment reveals that a combination of the recruiting and guiding mechanisms allows for a principled enhancement of the reviewer pool and results in reviews of superior quality compared to the conventional pool of reviews as evaluated by senior members of the program committee (meta-reviewers).

ReviewFlow: Intelligent Scaffolding to Support Academic Peer Reviewing

“…Another study offers novice reviewers a more guided introduction to the different stages of the reviewing process, such as how to lead a discussion among reviewers, to help novices write better reviews. The results showed that with this guidance on the reviewing stages, novice reviewers could deliver more "above expectation" reviews [80]. However, their guidance is only limited to introducing the different parts of the reviewing process, such as rebuttal and discussion, and providing novices opportunities to ask expert questions on the general process [80].…”

“…The number of papers in research communities has increased exponentially in recent years [85]. While this may be positively viewed as an acceleration of scientific progress, the disparity between growth rates of the submission and reviewer pools also creates more burden for reviewers [60,76,79,80]. To avoid overloading reviewers, conferences need to find new sources of reviewers as there are not enough experienced reviewers to review all papers [80].…”

“…While this may be positively viewed as an acceleration of scientific progress, the disparity between growth rates of the submission and reviewer pools also creates more burden for reviewers [60,76,79,80]. To avoid overloading reviewers, conferences need to find new sources of reviewers as there are not enough experienced reviewers to review all papers [80]. These novice and junior reviewers constitute a large fraction of the reviewer pool in computer science conferences [81].…”

“…A previous study explored and compared the reviews written by experienced reviewers versus junior reviewers and the study showed that junior reviewers were slightly harsher in scoring the clarity of the submissions [77,80]. In the meantime, other works provide empirical evidence that junior reviewers are more critical than their senior counterparts and reveal that graduate students' review comments are not very useful [62,67].…”

“…The peer review process seeks to assess whether submissions contribute new knowledge to a research community and generate feedback that helps authors improve the quality of their work [43,76]. Many communities are seeing a rapid increase in submissions [4,60,76,79,80]; while this could be seen as an indicator of scientific progress, it also has increased the pressure on reviewers. To meet increased demand, many research communities recruit a significant number of first-time reviewers or ACs (Associate Chairs) for each review cycle.…”