Does peer review stifle innovation?
Presenter
Assistant Professor at the School of Information
Doctoral Candidate at the School of Information
Abstract
The peer review process of academic journals is a key filter between the ideas that researchers generate and the ideas that become vetted and visible. Despite decades of debate, little is known about whether peer review favors novel ideas or incremental ideas. We address this question using the peer review files of ~20K submissions to two journals in biology, one field-leading and one middle-tier. We find that reviewers do not show a preference for or against novel ideas. However, the editors of the top journal select for novelty at each stage, making novel ideas more likely to get published. In contrast, the editors of the middle-tier journal select against novel ideas at each stage. We investigate possible explanations of the status-novelty relationship, including editors’ decision-making and composition of the pool of submissions.