Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics Seminar: Misha Teplitskiy
Ability to navigate the peer review process as a driver of global disparities in scientific productivity
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Abstract
Scientific productivity, as measured through publications, varies greatly across people and countries. Anecdotally, the variation in publishing success is not only the result of differences in quality, but also people's ability to "navigate" the peer review process. This presentation will discuss two studies that systematically measure people's ability to navigate peer review and its contribution to publishing success. Both studies use administrative peer review data a major publishing company, covering ~180K submission to 62 journals between 2018-2022. First, we explore the role of authors suggesting reviewers. Consistent with previous work, we find that author-suggested reviewers are more positive than editor-suggested ones. For authors, getting their suggested reviewers onto the reviewer panel is thus strategically important. Yet, authors from non-Western countries (e.g. China, India, Iran) are in relative terms 33% less likely to get their suggestions onto the panel. This difference is driven by editors inviting non-Western authors' suggested reviewers less often. Second, we explore how authors deal with rejections. To isolate social mechanisms from differences in paper quality, we examine the outcomes for papers that are rejected by the same journal at about the same time with the exact same set of reviewer recommendations. Teams that are bigger and from Western countries (e.g. UK, USA) are more likely to ultimately publish their rejected papers, and publish them in better journals. These studies suggest that scientists' ability to navigate the peer review system, above and beyond any differences in quality, is an important explanation for global disparities in scientific productivity.
Speaker bio
I am an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. My research focuses on the drivers of scientific innovation ("science of science"). I study how scientists communicate ideas to one another and the general public, and how these flows are shaped by status, culture, location and technology. I also study how scientific organizations evaluate and select research projects to invest into. Methodologically, I employ a variety of tools from the computational social science toolkit, especially field experiments and quantitative analysis of administrative data.
The evaluation/selection stream of work aims to identify how the evaluation processes organizations use may unintentionally favor particular ideas or innovators. Projects include:
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Status bias in scientific peer review, and how to mitigate it
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Incentives for novelty
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Benefits and costs of interdisciplinarity
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The role of social capital in scientific success
The communication stream of work explores how exposure to others’ ideas depends on reading practices, co-location, conferencing and other channels of communication, and identifies how status and culture make some scientists’ ideas more visible than others’. Projects include:
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Gender and self-promotion in science
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Conferences as a mechanism to spread ideas
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Science and the media: What research is picked up by the media, and how is it covered?
Last but not least, I am interested in political polarization. I am studying how the physical places where individuals spend time provides (or doesn't) exposure to cross-partisan ideas.
Previously, I was a postdoc at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH). I received my PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, where I was a member of KnowledgeLab.
See my CV for papers and links.
Lab: DiscoveryLab, www.discolab.org
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DzSXZd9yYy8C