James M. Zumel Dumlao

James M. Zumel Dumlao

PhD Candidate, University of Michigan School of Information

Posts by Collection

portfolio

publications

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

Lack of peer reviewer diversity advantages scientists from wealthier countries

Published in SocArXiv, 2025

Preprint Authors from low- and middle-income countries often have lower acceptance rates in academic journals, leading to their ideas receiving less attention. One hypothesized contributor to this disparity is the limited geographical diversity of peer reviewers. If reviewers favor submissions from their own country (i.e. homophily), and authors from certain countries are disproportionately reviewed by same-country reviewers, this creates a “geographical representation bias” favoring those authors. Using administrative data from the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP), encompassing metadata on 204,718 submissions to 60 STEM journals between 2018-2022, we find strong evidence of this bias. Comparing different reviewers of the same manuscript, we find that those from the same country as the corresponding author are 4.78 percentage points more likely to review positively, and authors from countries well-represented in the reviewer pool (e.g., USA, China, India) are 8-9 times more likely to be evaluated by same-country reviewers. An instrumental variables analysis using an exogenous policy change that created variation in which submissions were anonymized shows that anonymizing submissions does not significantly reduce homophily. These findings provide support for efforts to diversify reviewer pools, and suggest that there are no “quick fixes” for geographical representation bias.

Recommended citation: Zumel Dumlao, James M., and Misha Teplitskiy. 2025. "Lack of Peer Reviewer Diversity Advantages Authors from Wealthier Countries." SocArXiv. February 26. doi:10.31235/osf.io/754e3_v3. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/754e3

talks

teaching

Teaching Assistant

ECON 311: Intermediate Microeconomics, University of San Francisco, Economics Department, 2020

Graded 5 problem sets for 34 students taught by Prof. Mario Muzzi.