How do journal editors affect what papers and which authors get published? The research presented in the proposed presentation builds on a novel dataset that provides coverage of all journal editors across the full ecosystem of social science journals. This enables the authors to investigate the variation in how editors affect the publication process across the journal hierarchy, and across types of journals. In addition to the unique data, the authors take advantages in the computational social sciences to develop a state-of-the-art methodology for evaluating the role of editors in shaping publications and the evolution of science.

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.