First Paper Friday: James Dumlao

University of Michigan School of Information doctoral candidate James M. Zumel Dumlao’s first paper as a UMSI student examines how the geographic distribution of peer reviewers affects which research articles are recommended for publication and, ultimately, whose voices are amplified in the scientific community.

The paper, “Geographical diversity of peer reviewers shapes author success," was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. His co-author is  Dumlao’s advisor, UMSI assistant professor Misha Teplitskiy. 

The study draws on unique metadata from the Institute of Physics Publishing , which manages a portfolio of STEM journals. By analyzing detailed reviewer reports, the study offers rare evidence about the effects of reviewer diversity on scientific publishing.

The findings reveal two key patterns: First, reviewers from the same country as the author were about five percentage points more likely to recommend acceptance of a paper compared to other reviewers of the same work. Second, authors’ chances of being reviewed by someone from their own country were much higher in well-represented nations like the United States, China and India. 

Together, these dynamics create what Dumlao and Teplitskiy call a “geographical representation bias,” where scientists in certain countries enjoy a structural advantage in getting published. The study also found that anonymizing author identities did not reduce this bias.

“Many studies have noted a lack of diversity in where peer reviewers are located and voiced concerns about whether this warps science toward the interests common in those locations,” Dumlao says. “With such rich data, we were able to show that limited reviewer diversity really does tilt the playing field. Our findings highlight the need to think critically about how to diversify reviewer pools if we want a more equitable and representative scientific record.”

Dumlao is a fourth-year PhD student at UMSI and expects to graduate in fall 2027. He is a computational social scientist whose research focuses on how training, management, evaluation and selection shape the production and communication of scientific knowledge.

His path to UMSI began in the Bay Area, where he grew up. Before Michigan, Dumlao earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in international and development economics at the University of San Francisco, with a minor in public service and community engagement. He also worked as a research data analyst at the California Department of Industrial Relations, where he analyzed wage data to help determine fair pay standards for workers in different industries and regions. 

Dumlao and his collaborators are already extending this work to explore whether reviewers learn from participating in peer review and whether authors are more likely to cite their reviewers than other equally qualified experts. They are also considering how training and recruitment strategies might help diversify reviewer pools in the future.

At UMSI Dumlao says he loves his peers and the collaborative spirit. 

“I love our commitment to working on pressing issues that matter to a lot of people outside the academy,” Dumlao says. “As soon as we arrive at SI, we’re challenged to do work with high impact for both research communities and society.”

Read “Geographical diversity of peer reviewers shapes author success" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and see the abstract below: 

Scientific institutions like funding agencies and journals rely on peer reviewers to select among competing submissions. How does the geographical diversity of reviewers affect which authors are selected? If reviewers typically favor submissions from their own countries, but reviewers from only some countries are well represented in the reviewer pool, this can create a “geographical representation bias” favoring authors from those well-represented countries. Using administrative data on 204,718 submissions to 60 STEM journals from the Institute of Physics Publishing, we find support for representation bias. Reviewers from the same country as the corresponding author are 4.78 percentage points more likely to review positively compared to other reviewers of the same manuscript. Authors from the United States of America, China, and India are 8 to 9 times more likely to be evaluated by same-country reviewers compared to less-represented countries with similar incomes. Furthermore, an instrumental variables analysis of an anonymization policy shock shows that anonymizing submissions does not significantly reduce same-country homophily. Thus, investments in reviewer diversification may be necessary to mitigate the structural advantage of authors from major science-producing countries and avoid blind spots in collective knowledge. 

RELATED

Follow James Dumlao and Misha Teplitskiy’s research by visiting their UMSI profiles. 

Learn more information about UMSI’s PhD in Information program.