Conservatism and representativeness heuristic in peer reviews: Evidence from the finance literature 1946–2020

This paper explores whether journal referees take into account the author's scholarly credentials in their decisions using the stochastic process underlying the Yule-Simon distribution as a descriptive model of the peer-review process. We provide evidence that referees consider the author's publication record valuable information in their decision-making, and such referee behavior helps improve the efficacy of the peer-review process. We show that the probability that a newly accepted paper in a given journal is written by authors with no prior publications is lower for top journals, specialty journals, journals with higher Eigenfactor or Article Influence Score, and journals with more publications.