Researcher who waited nearly two years for rejection claims ‘nonsensical’ criticisms of his paper must have been chatbot-generated.
(11 Jul 2025) A UK academic has criticized the suspected use of chatbots in peer review after he was given lengthy instructions on improving his statistical analysis – despite not including any statistics in his rejected paper.
Keith Baker, a researcher on energy policy, submitted a review paper to the open-access journal Heliyon almost two years ago with the aim of highlighting how his proposals for a state-owned energy company in Scotland, suggested in 2014, had eventually been adopted in Wales.
Almost a year after submitting the paper to Heliyon, Baker finally received a lengthy list of recommendations from reviewers, including 14 suggestions on how to improve the paper’s statistical methods and reporting.
The authors were asked, for instance, to describe the algorithms used in the statistical analysis, show 95 per cent confidence intervals to guard against p-hacking and include “forest plots and funnel plots” to help visualize their results.
“The only statistics we mentioned in the paper were some figures from energy company accounts – the comments just didn’t make sense,” Baker told Times Higher Education.
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