Maintaining Academic Integrity in Conference Peer Review
As AI-generated submissions increase, conference chairs need systematic tools — not manual spot checks — to protect the integrity of their proceedings.
The integrity challenge
Academic conference organisers face a challenge that didn't exist five years ago: a significant and growing proportion of paper submissions contain AI-generated content, unattributed text, or both. Manual review processes — where programme committee members are expected to identify these issues during peer review — are failing under the volume.
A programme committee member reviewing twenty papers has neither the time nor the tools to perform meaningful integrity checks on each one. The result is that integrity problems are either missed entirely or caught inconsistently, creating unfairness between papers that receive scrutiny and those that don't.
Why this matters more for conferences than journals
Journals typically operate with lower submission volumes and longer review timelines. A journal editor can afford to spot-check suspicious submissions more carefully. A conference receiving five hundred submissions with a four-week review window cannot.
The consequences of integrity failures in conference proceedings are also more immediate. Proceedings are published quickly, often before the problems are discovered. Retraction from published proceedings is embarrassing for the conference, damaging to the programme chair's reputation, and confusing for researchers who have already cited the work.
What systematic screening looks like
Effective integrity screening at conference scale needs to happen automatically, before papers reach reviewers. This means:
Plagiarism detection that checks each submission against published literature, the submission pool itself (to catch duplicate submissions across tracks), and previous years' proceedings.
AI-content detection that flags papers where the writing patterns suggest AI generation rather than human authorship, triggering a manual review by the programme chair before the paper is assigned to a reviewer.
Conflict-of-interest detection that identifies reviewer-author relationships — institutional affiliations, co-authorship history, and declared conflicts — and prevents problematic assignments automatically.
Transparent audit trails that record every screening result, every reviewer assignment, and every editorial decision, so that post-publication challenges can be investigated with evidence.
The programme chair's responsibility
These tools don't replace editorial judgement — they make it possible at scale. A programme chair who has reviewed the screening report for every submission is in a far stronger position than one relying on reviewers to catch problems that weren't caught upstream.
See how AcadHub Conference Management handles integrity screening.