(23 Sept 2025) If you wanted to get a paper published in Science from 2015 to 2020, your odds were 70% lower if you were in China than in the United States. But being at an elite institution anywhere in the world may have given you an edge. Those are two findings from a rare study of internal data about submissions to the prominent, highly selective journal. The study shines a light on potential biases in acceptance and where they may arise in the complex process of choosing papers for publication.
The study is unusual and important, says Adina Kern-Goldberger, an obstetrics researcher at the Cleveland Clinic who has studied peer review but was not involved in the current work. “Scientific publishing is a less self-reflective field than some others [and yet] major academic journals really are the gatekeepers of science, and that has real implications for future [research] work and funding.” In giving the researchers access to confidential data on more than 110,000 manuscripts submitted to Science and its sister journal Science Advances, Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the journals, says he and his colleagues aimed to be “willing to look in the mirror and try to analyze things that we can do better.” (Science’s News section is independent of its editorial side.)
The observational study cannot prove cause-and-effect relationships. Still, it highlights some notable disparities in the fate of the more than 68,000 submissions Science received over the 6-year study period.
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