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IOPP Launches AI Tool to Identify Overlapping Peer-Review Reports
Institute of Physics Publishing presented its Duplicate Review Checker at an international research integrity conference and announced its deployment across all journals. The AI system flagged nearly 2,500 suspicious reports in an analysis of half a million submissions between 2020 and 2025. Separate studies identified hundreds of templated reviews described as review mills.
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Institute of Physics Publishing is rolling out an artificial-intelligence tool designed to detect duplicate or suspiciously similar peer-review reports across all its journals, the publisher announced on 5 May. The Duplicate Review Checker screens peer reviews for suspicious content.
Lauren Flintoft, research integrity manager at IOPP, presented findings from a pilot study testing the tool at the 9th World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver, Canada, on 4 May.
An analysis covered around half a million peer-review reports for manuscripts submitted to IOPP between 2020 and 2025. The AI tool identified nearly 2,500 reports that had at least 60 percent overlap with former reviewer reports. Of the flagged cases, 785 reports had at least 80 percent overlap.
Of the flagged cases, 89 reports were exact duplicates. IOPP developed the Duplicate Review Checker, which was presented by Flintoft at the conference in Vancouver.
Two studies of open-peer-review reports discovered hundreds of reviews for manuscripts across different publishers that appear to have been copied from a template. The two studies were co-authored by Maria Ángeles Oviedo-García of the University of Seville in Spain.
" The studies found reports that contained similar wording or identical typos and commonly included citations of the reviewers' own papers.
Renee Hoch, head of publication ethics at PLOS in San Francisco, California, says there have been rising cases of peer-review integrity issues at PLOS over the past few years. @Nature reported that most integrity checks focus on manuscripts, but peer-review process fraud receives less attention despite its prevalence.
