Phiewer review11/13/2022 Our preregistered ex ante hypothesis regarding the review-invitation acceptance rates had two components: The positive component (H1 +) predicted that this rate was higher in the condition where the more prominent author was mentioned in the invitation letter as corresponding author than in the conditions where no name was mentioned in the invitation letter. While both authors have the same gender ( 7), we could not hold race and name origin constant, since the Nobel laureate only had one project to write a paper about with a suitable junior researcher at the time.īased on results in the related literature-summarized in the preregistration document and in SI Appendix-we derived several hypotheses. Holding the affiliation constant was important because previous research documented an impact of institutional affiliation on the outcome of the review process under single-anonymized evaluation ( 4– 6). Both were affiliated with the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University at the time the paper was written. Inoua, an early career research associate (42 Google Scholar citations). Smith, the 2002 laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (54,000 Google Scholar citations as of December 2021), and the relatively unknown scientist is S. Specifically, we addressed two related research questions (RQs) derived from the literature summarized in SI Appendix: First, is there a status bias in potential reviewers’ propensity to accept the invitation to review a paper (RQ1)? Second, is there a status bias in their evaluation of the manuscript (RQ2)? To address both RQs, we used a new and unpublished research article that covered a broad range of topics in finance (to be of interest and relevance to many potential reviewers), which had been jointly written by a prominent scientist and a relatively unknown scientist. We measured the strength of the positive (“eminent scientists get disproportionately great credit”) and the negative (“unknown scientists tend to get disproportionately little credit”) components of this bias in a preregistered field experiment. Our findings complement and extend earlier results on double-anonymized vs. 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. 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 measured the extent of this bias in the peer-review process through a preregistered field experiment. Merton described this bias as prominent researchers getting disproportionately great credit for their contribution, while relatively unknown researchers get disproportionately little credit. 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.
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