ChatGPT identifies gender disparities in scientific peer review

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Strengths:

The innovative method is the biggest strength of this article. Moreover, the method can be implemented across fields and disciplines. I myself would like to see this method implemented in a grander scale. The author invested a lot of effort in data collection and I especially commend that ChatGPT assessed the reviews twice, to ensure greater objectivity.

Weaknesses:

I have several concerns regarding the methodology of the article. The first relates to the fact that the sample is not random. The selection of journal and inclusion and exclusion criteria do not contribute well to the strength of the evidence.

An important methodological fact is that the correlation between the two assessments of peer reviews was actually lower than we would expect (around 0.72 and 0.3 for the different linguistic characteristics). If the ChatGPT gave such different scores based on two assessments, should it not be sound to do even more assessments and then take the average?

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

Strengths include:

1. Given the variability in responses from ChatGPT, the author pooled two scores for each review and demonstrated significant correlation between these two iterations. He confirmed also reasonable scoring by manipulating reviews. Finally, he compared a small subset (7 papers) to human scorers and again demonstrated correlation with sentiment and politeness.

2. The figures are consistently well presented and informative. Figure 2C nicely plots the scores with example reviews. The supplementary data are also thoughtful and include combination of first/last author genders. It is interesting that first author female last author male has the lowest score.

3. A series of detailed analysis including breaking down reviews by subfield (interesting to see the wide range of reviewer sentiment/politeness scores in computational papers), institution, and author's name and inferred gender using Genderize. The author suggests that peer review to blind the reviewers to authors' gender may be helpful to mitigating the impoliteness seen.

Weaknesses include:

1. This study does not utilize any of the wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) sentiment analysis tools. While the author did have a small subset reviewed by human scorers, the paper would be strengthened by examining all the reviews systematically using some of the freely available tools (for example, many resources are available through Hugging Face [https://huggingface.co/blog/sentiment-analysis-python ]). These methods have been used in previous examinations of review text analysis (Luo et al. 2022. Quantitative Science Studies 2:1271-1295). Why use ChatGPT rather than these older validated methods? How does ChatGPT compare to these established methods? See also: colab.research.google.com/drive/1ZzEe1lqsZIwhiSv1IkMZdOtjPTSTlKwB?usp=sharing

2. The author's claim in the last paragraph that his study is proof of concept for NLP to analyze peer review fails to take into account the array of literature already done in this domain. The statement in the introduction that past reports (only three citations) have been limited to small dataset sizes is untrue (Ghosal et al. 2022. PLoS One 17:e0259238 contains over 1000 peer review documents, including sentiment analysis) and reflects a lack of review on the topic before examining this question.

3. The author acknowledges the limitation that only papers under neuroscience were evaluated. Why not scale this method up to other fields within Nature Communications? Cross-field analysis of the features of interest would examine if these biases are present in other domains.

Reviewer #3 (Public Review):

Strengths:

On the positive side, I thought the use of ChatGPT to score the sentiment of text was novel and interesting, and I was largely convinced by the parts of the methods which illustrate that the AI provides broadly similar sentiment and politeness scores to humans who were asked to rank a sub-set of the reviews. The paper is mostly clear and well-written, and tackles a question of importance and broad interest (i.e. the potential for bias in the peer review process, and the objectivity of peer review).

Weaknesses:

The sample size and scope of the paper are a bit limited, and I have concerns covering diverse aspects including statistical/inferential issues, missing references, and suggestions for other material that could be included that would greatly increase the usefulness of the paper. A major limitation is that the paper focuses on published papers, and thus is a biased sample of all the reviews that were written, which prevents the paper properly answering the questions that it sets out to answer (e.g. is peer review repeatable, fair and objective).