How Well Do LLMs Perform in Peer Review? Evidence from Finance and Accounting

With the growth of scientific output, the peer review system is approaching a breaking point: reviewers are increasingly hard to secure, and turnaround times lengthen accordingly. LLM-assisted or LLM-generated peer review has been proposed as a remedy, but how such models would treat manuscripts already published in top-tier journals, the closest thing the current system has to a gold standard of scientific validity, is not known. Here we assembled a corpus of 200 articles, each released under a CC BY 4.0 license and published in 2026, from 20 general-science, life-science, and clinical-medicine journals including Nature, Science, and Cell, and asked four current LLMs (two proprietary, two open-weight) to produce independent peer-review reports of each one under a blinded protocol. Their decisions were overwhelmingly harsh and starkly inconsistent with each other: 605 of 800 reviews (75.6%) recommended major revision or rejection, but the rate at which any single model did so ranged from 17.5% to 100% (p < 0.001), disagreement on manuscripts that had, by construction, already survived real editorial review at the journals in question. When the same manuscripts were doctored with one deliberately planted, field-specific methodological or statistical flaw, detection rates varied from 17.0% to 60.5% across models (p < 0.001). Recommending revision for papers that had already passed editorial review (low specificity) while missing flaws deliberately placed in front of them (low sensitivity), these models produce output that should be read for what it is: an uneven, framing- and model-dependent signal.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in academic peer review, yet their reliability, alignment with human judgment, and robustness to adversarial attacks remain poorly understood. We present a systematic benchmark of LLM-as-a-Reviewer on 898 papers stratified from NeurIPS and ICLR, evaluating 12 LLMs along three axes: rating calibration, divergence from human reviewers, and resistance to prompt injection embedded via an invisible font-mapping attack. We find that LLMs systematically overrate weaker submissions and diverge from humans in topical emphasis, under-flagging Clarity and over-flagging Reproducibility, while producing reviews two to three times longer with lower lexical diversity and a more standardized vocabulary. Prompt injection remains highly effective. Simple hidden instructions can promote low-scoring papers to acceptance-level ratings in a substantial fraction of cases, with effectiveness varying sharply across model families. While LLMs offer utility in structuring evaluations, their integration into peer review requires safeguards against both intrinsic biases and adversarial risks.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate scientific reviews, yet existing evaluations rarely examine whether different providers align with both conference decisions and human reviewing priorities within the same controlled setting. We compare reviews from OpenAI GPT-5.4, Google Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, and Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 with human reviews and final decisions for 300 topic-matched ICLR 2026 submissions, equally divided among oral, poster, and rejected papers. Each model reviewed every paper using identical instructions and rating scales after decision information was removed. Our study contributes a cross-provider analysis of three complementary dimensions: alignment with broad and fine-grained decision categories, differences in recommendation-scale usage, and thematic agreement in identified weaknesses. All three LLMs distinguished accepted from rejected papers, but none reproduced the oral versus poster distinction present in human ratings. Scoring patterns were provider-specific: Gemini assigned systematically higher ratings, while OpenAI and Claude were closer to humans for rejected and poster papers but more critical of oral papers. Human and LLM reviews also differed in emphasis, with LLMs more frequently identifying missing baseline comparisons and humans more often raising computational-efficiency concerns. These results show that broad decision alignment does not imply agreement with finer human judgments or reviewing priorities.