Big Name Researchers May Get Special Treatment, Limiting New Science

Oct. 10, 2022 – Are there “cool kids” in science? Yes, there are – and which may be limiting up-and-comers from getting new analysis out into the world.  

“Researchers who have a good reputation, are from very prominent universities, and are from the U.S. probably have a higher chance of getting their work into a good journal than does someone whose work is equally good but is a young PhD from an obscure university or country,” says Juergen Huber, PhD, of the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. 

There’s a purpose for that, says Huber, and it’s known as standing bias – our tendency to favor the work of somebody we all know. It’s a bit like the favored child at college getting picked first for kickball. We go together with who we acknowledge, respect, or wish to be preferred by.   

A brand new research, co-authored by Huber, reveals how this standing bias can affect peer evaluation, an vital a part of scientific publishing. 

“[Expert reviewers] read the paper and decide if it is scientifically significant enough to be published in a journal,” says Sabiou Inoua, PhD, one other co-author of the research. 

A peer-reviewed paper is the gold normal within the analysis world. As a end result, researchers have to get their work peer-reviewed to validate their findings. But when standing bias jeopardizes this course of – as Huber and Inoua’s analysis suggests it does – it may maintain new analysis again, impeding progress in each area from drugs to public coverage.   

What the Researchers Did

For the research, the researchers distributed a finance paper to greater than 3,300 peer reviewers, presenting it 3 ways: 

1. For some, the paper was credited to Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel laureate and distinguished research writer.
2. For others, it was credited to Inoua, an “early-career research associate” with 42 Google Scholar citations (in comparison with Smith’s 54,000 citations). 
3. In a 3rd model, the paper was nameless, with no research writer listed. 

Reviewers first have to resolve whether or not to learn a piece in any respect. In the research, 31% agreed to learn the nameless paper, in contrast with 28.5% who selected to learn Inoua’s work. For Smith, the evaluation price improved to 38.5%. 

That means the nameless writer had a higher probability of getting their work learn than the much less acknowledged writer, and the Nobel laureate had a greater probability nonetheless. 

The variations had been much more noticeable when it got here time to just accept (or reject) the paper. When the Nobel laureate was listed, 23% of reviewers rejected the paper. Anonymous was turned down by 48%. And a whopping 65% deemed the paper unfit for publishing when the writer was the rookie researcher.

Remember, this was the similar paper. The solely distinction was the writer. 

“The rejection rate is three times as high for low-prominence authors, implying that they have much lower chances of getting published,” Huber says. “As publishing is crucial, especially for early-career researchers, that is quite bad news.”

Is It Time to ‘Fix’ Peer Review? 

This research provides to rising scrutiny of the peer evaluation course of, together with whether or not it could be vulnerable to other forms of bias, equivalent to racial or gender bias. (It additionally comes amid a waning pandemic, after an pressing want for COVID therapies prompted many researchers to bypass peer evaluation altogether, pushing papers straight to print to get them out sooner.)

One potential resolution might be to make use of a double-anonymized peer evaluation system, the place the reviewer and writer stay nameless. 

The downside: “Many papers awaiting peer review have already been presented in some form at conferences, or are otherwise available on the web,” Huber says. So, a single Google search may simply expose an writer’s identification.

But Huber feels assured that change is on the horizon. 

“Members of the scientific community are very interested and ready to take action,” he says. “Some processes need to change. There is a lot of potential for the 300-year history of peer review to take the next step.” How the method will change shouldn’t be but identified, however being conscious of the issue is step one.