论文标题
引用观察和审查:关于同行评审中引用偏见的研究
Cite-seeing and Reviewing: A Study on Citation Bias in Peer Review
论文作者
论文摘要
引用在研究人员的职业中起着重要的作用,这是评估科学影响的关键因素。许多轶事建议作者利用这一事实,并引用潜在的审稿人试图为其提交获得更积极的评估。在这项工作中,我们调查了这样的引用偏见是否真的存在:审稿人自己在提交中的工作是否导致他们对提交有积极偏见?结合了机器学习和算法经济学的两个旗舰会议的审查过程,我们执行了一项观察性研究,以测试同行评审中的引文偏见。在我们的分析中,我们仔细说明了各种混杂因素,例如纸质质量和审阅者专业知识,并应用不同的建模技术来减轻对模型不匹配的担忧。总体而言,我们的分析涉及1,314篇论文和1,717名审阅者,并在我们考虑的两个场所中都检测到引文偏见。就效果大小而言,通过引用审稿人的作品,提交的机会有非平凡的机会从审稿人那里获得更高的分数:在5点李克特项目中,得分的预期提高约为0.23。作为参考,单个审阅者的分数提高得分平均使提交的位置提高了11%。
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 reviewer's 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 reviewer's 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.