Competition for publication in the top scientific journals like Science, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Economic Review is fierce. Every year, elite journals like these receive tens of thousands of submissions, which go through a multi-stage peer-review process — the gold standard for assessing whether a study meets the criteria for publication. The small fraction of papers that make it to publication plays a powerful role in scientific discourse, shaping both public policy and scientific careers, yet the confidentiality involved in the peer-review process limits the possibility of studying the process itself.
This lack of data means that “peer review at elite journals is both undertheorized and undercharacterized, despite many insights from past studies about peer review in general,” write the authors of a recent paper that begins to take on the challenge. The study, led by former SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Sam Zhang (University of Vermont) with SFI External Professors Aaron Clauset and Dan Larremore (both at CU Boulder) and others, presents the first such analysis. Examining more than 110,000 submissions to Science and Science Advances from 2016 through 2020, they found that researchers from prestigious universities with large research teams were more likely to be published, while papers with smaller research teams, authors based in China or at lesser-known schools, or whose topics focus on social sciences face a disadvantage. The study, along with an anonymized dataset, was published in Science Advances on July 15.
By calling out potential biases and making their dataset publicly available, the authors hope to help journals improve their processes, though they urge caution in interpreting the results.
"A crucial point about our analysis is that none of our findings rise to the level of causality, and they should not be interpreted in that way," says Clauset. "Rather, what we do find is a number of fascinating associations between certain attributes of manuscripts and their relative success in peer review at elite journals like Science and Science Advances. For instance, we find little overall association between author gender and success in peer review. What little association we do find is consistent with a seniority effect: more senior researchers are somewhat more likely to be men."
The findings raise an important question: To what degree are important scientific discoveries going unnoticed because their authors lack certain characteristics?
"This is really a first look at this process that was previously opaque," says Zhang. "With the rise of AI slop and the ability to mass-produce junk science, the role of established gatekeepers like these elite journals becomes more important as these processes get put under strain. These types of open-data analysis about what is going on at the journal might help the community prepare for and understand how editorial processes will need to change."
Read the paper, “Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals” in Science Advances (July 15, 2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aec0494
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- July 15, 2026: CU Boulder news release
- July 15, 2026: University of Vermont news release