The optimal amount of information to provide in an academic manuscript

Authors may believe that having more information available about the research can help reviewers make better recommendations. However, too much information in a manuscript may create problems to the reviewers and may lead them to poorer recommendations. An information overload on the part of the reviewer might be a state in which she faces an amount of information comprising the accumulation of manuscript informational cues that inhibit the reviewer’s ability to optimally determine the best possible recommendation about the acceptance or rejection of the manuscript. Therefore the author wants to determine the amount of manuscript attributes to provide to reviewers. With this goal in mind we show that there is an intermediate number of manuscript attributes that maximizes the probability of acceptance. If too much research information is provided, some of it is not as useful for recommending acceptance, the average informativeness per research attribute evaluation is too low, and reviewers end up recommending rejection. If too little information is provided about the research, reviewers may end up not having sufficient details to recommend its acceptance. We also show that authors should provide more information to reviewers with more favorable initial valuation toward the research. For those reviewers with a less favorable prior attitude, the author should provide only the most important manuscript attributes. Given that expert reviewers face less load than potential readers, it follows that with respect to the target audience the optimal author’s strategy is also to trade off the amount of research information provided in the manuscript with the average informativeness of these items by selecting an intermediate number of attributes.