A recent NBER Working Paper has found that the review process doesn’t really help much. Well, really what they find is that going through the review process doesn’t lead to significantly more citations in a given year, but actually fewer citations. I love what’s behind the paper (are we really adding any value reviewing papers more than just accept/reject?). The authors have done a reasonable job trying to account for authors selecting into the reject/accept only track rather than the multiple-round review process that is customary in academic journals. Next step: convince someone to do a field experiment.
