journal editorial teams

Abstract: Generating coherent meta-reviews from multiple peer reviews is challenging when reviewer evidence conflicts and varies in reliability. Existing approaches typically formulate meta-review generation as a multi-document summarization task and aggregate reviewer feedback uniformly, making it difficult to determine which opinions should be prioritized under disagreement. In this paper, we study meta-review generation through reliability-aware evidence aggregation. Our framework first extracts aspect-level opinions from peer reviews and identifies conflicting evidence within each aspect. It then estimates opinion-level support and review-level quality to measure evidence reliability. Based on these signals, the framework assigns reliability-aware weights to reviewer feedback, enabling the generator to prioritize better-supported arguments while preserving diverse perspectives. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently improves meta-review generation over strong baselines on both automatic and human evaluations, with clear gains in conflict recognition and resolution under high-conflict review scenarios. The code and implementation details are publicly available at https://github.com/Wangxz729/reliability-aware-meta-review.

Abstract: Conferences, journals, funders, schools, and universities are struggling with a surge of potentially AI-generated submissions from ostensibly human authors, who may not have exercised sufficient human oversight for their manuscripts. In turn, institutions evaluating submissions can no longer reliably credit expertise based solely on authors' names on submitted work. To address this problem, we propose greCAPTCHA, a proctored assessment approach that measures authors' understanding of research manuscripts via the construct of capacity to verify, which we define as the knowledge and reasoning required to critically assess the contents underlying one's contributions to a manuscript. greCAPTCHA generates questions assessing multiple levels of understanding and provides an evaluative report based on authors' responses. Using a prototype implementation, we conduct a user study and semi-structured interviews with $31$ researchers to evaluate greCAPTCHA. Its automated scores predict which papers were or were not authored by study participants with an AUC of $0.90$. Participants reported positive overall experiences with the system and remarked on the appropriate construct validity for author understanding, while also suggesting important changes to be made before deployment. Our results provide initial evidence that greCAPTCHA can assess manuscript-specific understanding under proctored conditions.

Abstract: As software engineering research submission counts surge, peer reviewers face severe time constraints, making systematic verification of citation-supported claims prohibitively expensive. Consequently, unsubstantiated claims and semantic drift can propagate undetected across scientific literature. Existing approaches such as fact-checking and retrieval-augmented generation tools operate on open-domain web data or evaluate claims in isolation without processing complete manuscripts. To address this gap, we present RefVerifier, a semi-automated, citation-bounded reference verification prototype designed to support in academic peer review. RefVerifier extracts citation-bearing sentences from manuscripts, checks bibliography metadata against scholarly databases, resolves references to full-text open-access PDFs, localizes relevant evidence passages, and generates verdicts with natural language explanations. Evaluating RefVerifier on public benchmarks shows claim detection at an F1 score of 0.990, open-access resolution of 57.6% of references, and evidence localization with a hit rate of 98% on abstracts and 68% on complete cited papers. In an end-to-end test with eight manuscripts, RefVerifier achieves a verdict accuracy of 71%. By automating document retrieval and evidence localization while preserving reviewer oversight, RefVerifier provides first indicators for the feasibility of semi-automated integrity checks in scholarly publishing.