Can AI Solve the Peer Review Crisis? A Large-Scale Experiment on LLM's Performance and Biases in Evaluating Economics Papers

Pat Pataranutaporn, Nattavudh Powdthavee and Pattie Maes
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Pat Pataranutaporn: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Pattie Maes: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

No 17659, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate whether artificial intelligence can address the peer review crisis in economics by analyzing 27,090 evaluations of 9,030 unique submissions using a large language model (LLM). The experiment systematically varies author characteristics (e.g., affiliation, reputation, gender) and publication quality (e.g., top-tier, mid-tier, low-tier, AI-generated papers). The results indicate that LLMs effectively distinguish paper quality but exhibit biases favoring prominent institutions, male authors, and renowned economists. Additionally, LLMs struggle to differentiate high-quality AI-generated papers from genuine top-tier submissions. While LLMs offer efficiency gains, their susceptibility to bias necessitates cautious integration and hybrid peer review models to balance equity and accuracy.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; peer review; large language model (LLM); bias in academia; economics publishing; equity-efficiency trade-off (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 C63 I23 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 73 pages
Date: 2025-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain, nep-cmp, nep-exp, nep-sea and nep-sog
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Working Paper: Can AI Solve the Peer Review Crisis? A Large Scale Experiment on LLM's Performance and Biases in Evaluating Economics Papers (2025)
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