Can artificial intelligence assess the quality of academic journal articles in the next REF? | Impact of Social Sciences

"For journal article prediction, there is no knowledge base related to quality that could be leveraged to predict REF scores across disciplines, so only the machine learning AI approach is possible. All previous attempts to produce related predictions have used machine learning (or statistical regression, which is also a form of pattern matching). Thus, we decided to build machine learning systems to predict journal article scores. As inputs, based on an extensive literature review of related prior work, we chose: field and year normalised citation rate; authorship team size, diversity, productivity, and field and year normalised average citation impact; journal names and citation rates (similar to the Journal Impact Factor); article length and abstract readability; and words and phrases in the title, keywords and abstract. We used provisional REF2021 scores for journal articles with these inputs and asked the AI to spot patterns that would allow it to accurately predict REF scores...."