An author's country of origin influences research paper rejection rates
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Peer-reviewed literature demonstrates that geographical origin and regional representation bias influence peer review outcomes, reviewer evaluations, and the likelihood of recommendation for academic research papers.
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.
[Reasons for rejection of articles vor publication in the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde in 1990]. To deduce recommendations for authors which decrease the rejection probability we investigated retrospectively which reasons were mentioned in 1990 by the editorial board of the 'Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde' when it rejected original articles, reviews, clinical lessons and case reports, and whether length of the article, professional status of the first author, most relevant specialism and origin of the article influenced the rejection probability. Out of 547 articles 38% (208) were rejected; case reports were rejected most often (49%), reviews least often (33%). Peer review of original articles was the most thorough, of case studies the least. The most frequent reason for rejection in all categories was 'substantial shortcomings', particularly in the original articles (80%). Rejection of clinical lessons and case studies was relatively often due to criteria concerning the clinical message. Both rejected and accepted articles on average exceeded the length limit.
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