Through the Secret Gate: A Study of Member-Contributed Submissions in PNAS

This work studies “Contributed” articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), a streamlined submission track for members of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS). We assess the nature and impact of those articles and the background and status of their authors and contributors. Analysing over 46,000 articles published 2007-2020, we find that: (1) PNAS-Contributed articles tend to spend less time in the review process than Direct submissions; (2) Direct submissions tend to be slightly higher cited than Contributed articles, which are particularly overrepresented amongst least-cited PNAS papers; (3) PNAS-Contributed articles generally appear in lower per-author citation deciles than Direct submissions, but are more likely to appear in the overall top citation deciles of authors; (4) authors with lower mean normalised citation scores are profiting most from articles published as Contributed papers, in terms of citation impact.