| Abstract: |
Peer-review is a well-established cornerstone of the scientific process, yet
it is not immune to biases like the 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 getting disproportionately little credit (1). We measured
the extent of this bias in the peer-review process through a pre-registered
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 percent recommended
“reject†when the prominent researcher was the only author shown, 48
percent did so when the paper was anonymized, and 65 percent 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
(2–10). |