Nobel and Novice: Author Prominence Affects Peer Review

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).