Are We Truly Innovating? A Qualitative and Quantitative Study of Originality in AI Research Papers

ArXi:2602.06054v3 Announce Type: replace Assessing originality in AI research is arguably the most consequential yet least reliable step in peer review. Reviewer judgments of originality remain opaque, inconsistent, and dependent on comparisons to prior work that are often incomplete. In this paper, we present a large-scale, data-driven qualitative and quantitative analysis of research originality based on over 100,000 peer-review reports from leading AI venues, spanning a period of rapid growth in the field.