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Innovation Dynamics of Cultural Production: Evidence in Rap Lyrics

Published in USF Scholarship Repository, 2020

Zumel Dumlao, James M., Junjie Lei, Emeka Nwosu, Li Yu Oon, Tsai Ling Jeffrey Wong, James Rising, and Jesse Anttila-Hughes. Master's Thesis.

Reward Schemes, Competition, and Output within Scientific Teams

Published in UMSI Field Preliminary Milestone, 2024

Scientists often perform their work organized in laboratories. As lab teams become increasingly large, research management grows in its capacity to make science more useful and efficient. Generally, management choices influence output by modifying workplace conditions, and thereby the skill, effort, and time workers devote to production. Managers may choose team members’ reward scheme, and one option is to introduce within-team competition for incentives. In science, inter-lab competition is well-documented, while intra-lab competition is understudied. This field preliminary paper reviews prior work from economics, sociology, and labor studies relevant to individualistic and competitive reward schemes and output, and considers how findings in non-science settings might apply to scientific production. A survey and interview study is proposed to address the lack of theoretical clarity on how research management choices shape intra-lab competition and output at the lab and individual levels.

Recommended citation: Zumel Dumlao, James M.. 2024. "Reward Schemes, Competition, and Output within Scientific Teams." Field Preliminary Paper. December 26. https://jamesmzd.github.io/files/JMZD_field_prelim_paper_revision.pdf

Geographical diversity of peer reviewers shapes author success

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025

Scientific institutions like funding agencies and journals rely on peer reviewers to select among competing submissions. How does the geographical diversity of reviewers affect which authors are selected? If reviewers typically favor submissions from their own countries, but reviewers from only some countries are well represented in the reviewer pool, this can create a “geographical representation bias” favoring authors from those well-represented countries. Using administrative data on 204,718 submissions to 60 STEM journals from the Institute of Physics Publishing, we find support for representation bias. Reviewers from the same country as the corresponding author are 4.78 percentage points more likely to review positively compared to other reviewers of the same manuscript. Authors from the United States of America, China, and India are 8 to 9 times more likely to be evaluated by same-country reviewers compared to less-represented countries with similar incomes. Furthermore, an instrumental variables analysis of an anonymization policy shock shows that anonymizing submissions does not significantly reduce same-country homophily. Thus, investments in reviewer diversification may be necessary to mitigate the structural advantage of authors from major science-producing countries and avoid blind spots in collective knowledge.

Recommended citation: J.M. Zumel Dumlao, & M. Teplitskiy, Geographical diversity of peer reviewers shapes author success, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (33) e2507394122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2507394122 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2507394122