Nobel and Novice: Author Prominence Affects Peer Review

Authors

Jürgen Huber, University of Innsbruck
Sabiou M. Inoua, Chapman UniversityFollow
Rudolf Kerschbamer, University of Innsbruck
Christian König-Kersting, University of Innsbruck
Stefan Palan, University of Graz
Vernon L. Smith, Chapman UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-16-2022

Abstract

Peer-review is a well-established cornerstone of the scientific process, yet it is not immune to status bias. Merton identified the problem as one in which prominent researchers get disproportionately great credit for their contribution while relatively unknown researchers get disproportionately little credit.¹ We measure the extent of this effect in the peer-review process through a pre-registered field experiment. We invite more than 3,300 researchers to review a paper jointly written by a prominent author – a Nobel laureate – and by a relatively unknown author – an early-career research associate –, varying whether reviewers see the prominent author’s name, an anonymized version of the paper, or the less well-known author’s name. We find strong evidence for the status bias: while only 23 percent recommend “reject” when the prominent researcher is the only author shown, 48 percent do so when the paper is anonymized, and 65 percent do so when the little-known author is the only author shown. Our findings complement and extend earlier results on double-anonymized vs. singleanonymized review^2,3,4,5,6,7 and strongly suggest that double-anonymization is a minimum requirement for an unbiased review process.

Comments

ESI Working Paper 22-15

This paper later underwent peer review and was published as:

Recommended Citation

Huber, J., Inoua, S., Kerschbamer, R., König-Kersting, C., Palan, S., & Smith, V. L. (2022). Nobel and novice: Author prominence affects peer review. ESI Working Paper 22-15. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/376/