How do Authors' Perceptions of their Papers Compare with Co-authors' Perceptions and Peer-review Decisions?

TL;DR

This study surveys NeurIPS 2021 authors to compare their perceptions of their papers with peer-review outcomes, revealing overconfidence, gender differences, and discrepancies between author rankings and review decisions.

Contribution

It provides large-scale empirical insights into author perceptions, calibration, and agreement with peer review in a major computer science conference.

Findings

Authors overestimate acceptance probabilities by about three times.

Gender differences exist in prediction calibration, with females slightly more miscalibrated.

Authors' rankings agree with review outcomes 93% of the time, but discrepancies occur.

Abstract

How do author perceptions match up to the outcomes of the peer-review process and perceptions of others? In a top-tier computer science conference (NeurIPS 2021) with more than 23,000 submitting authors and 9,000 submitted papers, we survey the authors on three questions: (i) their predicted probability of acceptance for each of their papers, (ii) their perceived ranking of their own papers based on scientific contribution, and (iii) the change in their perception about their own papers after seeing the reviews. The salient results are: (1) Authors have roughly a three-fold overestimate of the acceptance probability of their papers: The median prediction is 70% for an approximately 25% acceptance rate. (2) Female authors exhibit a marginally higher (statistically significant) miscalibration than male authors; predictions of authors invited to serve as meta-reviewers or reviewers are similarly calibrated, but better than authors who were not invited to review. (3) Authors' relative ranking of scientific contribution of two submissions they made generally agree (93%) with their predicted acceptance probabilities, but there is a notable 7% responses where authors think their better paper will face a worse outcome. (4) The author-provided rankings disagreed with the peer-review decisions about a third of the time; when co-authors ranked their jointly authored papers, co-authors disagreed at a similar rate -- about a third of the time. (5) At least 30% of respondents of both accepted and rejected papers said that their perception of their own paper improved after the review process. The stakeholders in peer review should take these findings into account in setting their expectations from peer review.