Geographical disparities in navigating rejection in science drive disparities in its file drawer
Hong Chen, Christopher I Rider, David Jurgens, and 1 more author
Available at SSRN, 2024
Science progresses when contributions are publicized, usually in journals, for others to build upon, but the typical manuscript is rejected. We consider how differential responses to manuscript rejection generate differential representation in not only published knowledge but also the "file drawer" of unpublished research. Analyzing 126K manuscripts rejected by 62 STEM journals published by the Institute of Physics Publishing, we document several new empirical facts. Conditioning on manuscript quality (as proxied by peer review recommendations) and when compared to authors at institutions in non-Western countries, Western-country authors are 5.7% more likely to publish a manuscript after rejection; publish 23 days faster; revise 5.9% less; change co-authors 12.0% less; and ultimately publish in journals with 0.8% higher impact factors. Although exploratory surveys of rejected authors are inconclusive, our empirical analyses implicate geographic differences in access to procedural knowledge - how to interpret feedback, revise a manuscript, and resubmit elsewhere. Post-rejection outcomes are better when corresponding authors are likely to have better access to procedural knowledge, such as prior publishing experience and Western co-authors. Overall, these results imply that the file-drawer of unpublished research contains a disproportionate amount of ideas from non-Western countries, in part because of differences in procedural knowledge.