Can your paper evade the editors axe? Towards an AI assisted peer review system

Abstract

This work is an exploratory study of how we could progress a step towards an AI assisted peer- review system. The proposed approach is an ambitious attempt to automate the Desk-Rejection phenomenon prevalent in academic peer review. In this investigation we first attempt to decipher the possible reasons of rejection of a scientific manuscript from the editors desk. To seek a solution to those causes, we combine a flair of information extraction techniques, clustering, citation analysis to finally formulate a supervised solution to the identified problems. The projected approach integrates two important aspects of rejection: i) a paper being rejected because of out of scope and ii) a paper rejected due to poor quality. We extract several features to quantify the quality of a paper and the degree of in-scope exploring keyword search, citation analysis, reputations of authors and affiliations, similarity with respect to accepted papers. The features are then fed to standard machine learning based classifiers to develop an automated system. On a decent set of test data our generic approach yields promising results across 3 different journals. The study inherently exhibits the possibility of a redefined interest of the research community on the study of rejected papers and inculcates a drive towards an automated peer review system.