Reputation or peer review? The role of outliers.

ABSTRACT: We present an agent-based model of paper publication and consumption that allows to study the effect of two different evaluation mechanisms, peer review and reputation, on the quality of the manuscripts accessed by a scientific community. The model was empirically calibrated on two data sets, mono- and multi-disciplinary. Our results point out that disciplinary settings differ in the rapidity with which they deal with extreme events-papers that have an extremely high quality, that we call outliers. In the mono-disciplinary case, reputation is better than traditional peer review to optimize the quality of papers read by researchers. In the multi-disciplinary case, if the quality landscape is relatively flat, a reputation system also performs better. In the presence of outliers, peer review

SUBMITTER: Grimaldo F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6096687 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature