Editors are Gatekeepers of Science, but Individual Editors Don’t Matter Much by Joshua Krieger, Kyle Myers, Ariel Dora Stern :: SSRN

 

As editors for academic journals, a select few individuals control the certification and dissemination of science. We examine editors’ influence on the content of their journals by unpacking the role of three major forces in publication. We term these “journal missions” (stable revealed preferences), “topic markets” (the aggregate supply of and demand for specific topics), and “scientific homophily” (via editorial gatekeeping). Focusing on a panel of leading biomedical journals, we find that missions and markets explain the vast majority of variation in published content. Conditional on these forces, the upper bound of the editor-homophily effect is statistically significant but practically unimportant. Our findings suggest that marginal changes in editorial board composition will not meaningfully impact a journal’s scientific content in the short run; however, our results do not rule out persistent or pervasive frictions in the publication process.