IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/econwp/qt3883h8j1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Cite-seeing and reviewing: A study on citation bias in peer review

Author

Listed:
  • Stelmakh, Ivan
  • Rastogi, Charvi
  • Liu, Ryan
  • Chawla, Shuchi
  • Shah, Nihar
  • Echenique, Federico

Abstract

Citations play an important role in researchers careers as a key factor in evaluation of scientific impact. Many anecdotes advice authors to exploit this fact and cite prospective reviewers to try obtaining a more positive evaluation for their submission. In this work, we investigate if such a citation bias actually exists: Does the citation of a reviewers own work in a submission cause them to be positively biased towards the submission? In conjunction with the review process of two flagship conferences in machine learning and algorithmic economics, we execute an observational study to test for citation bias in peer review. In our analysis, we carefully account for various confounding factors such as paper quality and reviewer expertise, and apply different modeling techniques to alleviate concerns regarding the model mismatch. Overall, our analysis involves 1,314 papers and 1,717 reviewers and detects citation bias in both venues we consider. In terms of the effect size, by citing a reviewers work, a submission has a non-trivial chance of getting a higher score from the reviewer: an expected increase in the score is approximately 0.23 on a 5-point Likert item. For reference, a one-point increase of a score by a single reviewer improves the position of a submission by 11% on average.

Suggested Citation

  • Stelmakh, Ivan & Rastogi, Charvi & Liu, Ryan & Chawla, Shuchi & Shah, Nihar & Echenique, Federico, 2023. "Cite-seeing and reviewing: A study on citation bias in peer review," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt3883h8j1, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:econwp:qt3883h8j1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/3883h8j1.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Blaise Cronin, 2013. "Citation gamesmanship: testing for evidence of ego bias in peer review," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 95(3), pages 851-862, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eduardo Kunzel Teixeira & Mirian Oliveira, 2018. "Editorial board interlocking in knowledge management and intellectual capital research field," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(3), pages 1853-1869, December.
    2. J. A. García & Rosa Rodriguez-Sánchez & J. Fdez-Valdivia, 2016. "Why the referees’ reports I receive as an editor are so much better than the reports I receive as an author?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 106(3), pages 967-986, March.
    3. Sergio Copiello, 2018. "On the money value of peer review," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 613-620, April.
    4. Sugimoto, Cassidy R. & Larivière, Vincent & Ni, Chaoqun & Cronin, Blaise, 2013. "Journal acceptance rates: A cross-disciplinary analysis of variability and relationships with journal measures," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(4), pages 897-906.
    5. Kevin J. Boudreau & Eva C. Guinan & Karim R. Lakhani & Christoph Riedl, 2016. "Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource Allocation in Science," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(10), pages 2765-2783, October.
    6. Shuo Xu & Mengjia An & Xin An, 2021. "Do scientific publications by editorial board members have shorter publication delays and then higher influence?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(8), pages 6697-6713, August.
    7. Wang, Qi & Sandström, Ulf, 2014. "Defining the Role of Cognitive Distance in the Peer Review Process: Explorative Study of a Grant Scheme in Infection Biology," INDEK Working Paper Series 2014/10, Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Industrial Economics and Management.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Humans; Prospective Studies; Peer Review; Bias; Research Personnel; Machine Learning; Peer Review; Research;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:econwp:qt3883h8j1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ibbrkus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.