Nitin Verma
About me
I am a Teaching Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Prior to this, I was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Arizona State University (ASU) and the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS).
My research program is aimed at understanding how the perceived veracity of everyday facts is affected by and contested through information technologies. My research program is ultimately centered on exploring belief-formation and the psychological, social, and technological factors that underpin that process.
Research Interests
You can get a better idea of my research interests, by looking at my published research, by visiting my Google Scholar page, and/or by visiting my UIUC faculty page. But here’s a summary of the topics I am currently focusing on:
Trustworthiness of Peer Reviews in Science Publishing
This is currently a major area of focus in my research agenda. I draw on key works in the science and history of science (e.g., Kuhn; Ezrahi; and Chubin & Hackett) to anticipate the impact advanced information technology is likely to have on science and innovation. I’m presently conducting preliminary studies to examine the role of large language models in peer review given how their involvement could shape science, science policy, and the public’s trust in science. This study compares ChatGPT-generated peer reviews with corresponding human-written reviews (cf. PeerRead dataset) to qualitatively assess the relevance and validity of generated reviews.
LLMs and other generative technologies will increasingly play a role in helping scholars conduct their day-to-day tasks of analyzing data and writing manuscripts. I’m currently working on a project exploring the impact of generative AI on the peer-review process in scholarly publishing in collaboration with Dr. Asheley Landrum in the Cronkite School of Journalism at ASU.
Trust in Information, Information Sources, and the Media
The notion of trust forms the thread that runs through my published and ongoing research. I have deeply invested my intellectual efforts in understanding the notion of trust right from its etymological roots, to the range of sociological concepts the word trust encodes in everyday language. I have channeled this motivation to better estimate if generative AI would upend public trust in photographic images and in recorded (in the archival sense) information broadly. In studying trust, I draw on literatures from multiple disciplines including information, communication, sociology, and psychology.