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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Thanks Barkley.

Are there people doing tests of these sort of things? Getting papers published under different names (setting it up on different websites, if need be) to check what happens to the paper? Just knowing that such tests were taking place may be enough to get reviewers to do their job more properly.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Following Carl Shulman, another reason there may be less contradiction than appears is indeed the potential for Boolean fuzziness here. So, my own view, sitting in an editor's chair, is that a majority of decisions do mostly reflect "scientific value." At the same time, some of these other biases are certainly operating, in some cases in varying degrees according to journal. I would tend to agree that the high guess on "author recognition" is right, especially when we are talking about authors who are really at the top of prestige in the profession, like Nobel Prize winners.

Regarding good old boy networks and institution bias, I think these are very journal specific. Thus, it has long been widely believed that two of the top four econ journals have strong such biases, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, based at Harvard, and the Journal of Political Economy, based at Chicago. OTOH, I have seen at least one article that claimed that the papers published in those journals that came out of their respective institutions were actually the better ones in terms of citations, providing the warning that sometimes good old boy networks lead to the pals of the editors sending them their best papers. Not such a simple matter after all.

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