Estimating the Causal Effect of Early ArXiving on Paper Acceptance
This addresses the impact of preprints on peer review outcomes for researchers and conferences, but it is incremental as it applies existing causal methods to new observational data.
The study estimated the causal effect of releasing a preprint before peer review on paper acceptance at ICLR (2018-2022), finding a small effect with no significant advantage for specific author groups.
What is the effect of releasing a preprint of a paper before it is submitted for peer review? No randomized controlled trial has been conducted, so we turn to observational data to answer this question. We use data from the ICLR conference (2018--2022) and apply methods from causal inference to estimate the effect of arXiving a paper before the reviewing period (early arXiving) on its acceptance to the conference. Adjusting for confounders such as topic, authors, and quality, we may estimate the causal effect. However, since quality is a challenging construct to estimate, we use the negative outcome control method, using paper citation count as a control variable to debias the quality confounding effect. Our results suggest that early arXiving may have a small effect on a paper's chances of acceptance. However, this effect (when existing) does not differ significantly across different groups of authors, as grouped by author citation count and institute rank. This suggests that early arXiving does not provide an advantage to any particular group.