Nobel and novice: Author prominence affects peer review

Abstract

Peer review is a well-established cornerstone of the scientific process, yet it is not immune to biases like status bias, which we explore in this paper. Merton described this bias as prominent researchers getting disproportionately great credit for their contribution, while relatively unknown researchers get disproportionately little credit [R. K. Merton, Science 159, 56-63 (1968)]. We measured the extent of this bias in the peer-review process through a preregistered field experiment. We invited more than 3,300 researchers to review a finance research paper jointly written by a prominent author (a Nobel laureate) and by a relatively unknown author (an early career research associate), varying whether reviewers saw the prominent author's name, an anonymized version of the paper, or the less-well-known author's name. We found strong evidence for the status bias: More of the invited researchers accepted to review the paper when the prominent name was shown, and while only 23% recommended "reject" when the prominent researcher was the only author shown, 48% did so when the paper was anonymized, and 65% did when the little-known author was the only author shown. Our findings complement and extend earlier results on double-anonymized vs. single-anonymized review [R. Blank, Am. Econ. Rev. 81, 1041-1067 (1991); M. A. Ucci, F. D'Antonio, V. Berghella, Am. J. Obstet. Gynecol. MFM 4, 100645 (2022)].

Keywords: double-anonymized; peer review; scientific method; status bias.

Fig. 1.

Recommendation percentages by condition. In conditions AL and AH, the invitation email was anonymized, but the respective corresponding author’s name appeared on the manuscript, while in AA, both the invitation and the paper were anonymized. The tests are pairwise, two-sided Mann–Whitney U tests.

Fig. 2.

Responses to reviewer questionnaire items 1 through 6. We plot the percentage of neutral responses on the right-hand border of the figure. For each item, we conducted pairwise, two-sided Mann–Whitney U tests across conditions. In conditions AL and AH, the invitation email was anonymized, but the respective corresponding author’s name appeared on the manuscript, while in AA, both the invitation and the paper were anonymized.