Is novel research worth doing? Evidence from peer review at 49 journals.

ABSTRACT: There are long-standing concerns that peer review, which is foundational to scientific institutions like journals and funding agencies, favors conservative ideas over novel ones. We investigate the association between novelty and the acceptance of manuscripts submitted to a large sample of scientific journals. The data cover 20,538 manuscripts submitted between 2013 and 2018 to the journals Cell and Cell Reports and 6,785 manuscripts submitted in 2018 to 47 journals published by the Institute of Physics Publishing. Following previous work that found that a balance of novel and conventional ideas predicts citation impact, we measure the novelty and conventionality of manuscripts by the atypicality of combinations of journals in their reference lists, taking the 90th per

SUBMITTER: Teplitskiy M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9704701 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature