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Inconsistency in Conference Peer Review: Revisiting the 2014 NeurIPS Experiment (arxiv.org)
2 points by lnyan on Sep 22, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They rechecked a 2014 test where two separate committees reviewed the same papers, then tracked later citations. Half the score differences were personal opinion, and scores predicted citations for rejected papers but not accepted ones, so review spots weak work better than great work.

Abstract

In this paper we revisit the 2014 NeurIPS experiment that examined inconsistency in conference peer review. We determine that 50\% of the variation in reviewer quality scores was subjective in origin. Further, with seven years passing since the experiment we find that for \emph{accepted} papers, there is no correlation between quality scores and impact of the paper as measured as a function of citation count. We trace the fate of rejected papers, recovering where these papers were eventually published. For these papers we find a correlation between quality scores and impact. We conclude that the reviewing process for the 2014 conference was good for identifying poor papers, but poor for identifying good papers. We give some suggestions for improving the reviewing process but also warn against removing the subjective element. Finally, we suggest that the real conclusion of the experiment is that the community should place less onus on the notion of `top-tier conference publications' when assessing the quality of individual researchers. For NeurIPS 2021, the PCs are repeating the experiment, as well as conducting new ones.

Corinna Cortes, Neil D. Lawrence
arXiv:2109.09774 · cs.DL, cs.LG · submitted Sep 20, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · Source code available at https://github.com/lawrennd/neurips2014/

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