WHY WAS THE WORK SO HIGHLY DISCUSSED?

Our study was highly discussed, ultimately accruing 652 citations (Google Scholar). The reason is obvious: peer reviewed publications are the coin of the realm among academics. Our success in getting our work into journals, particularly top journals, is integral to all that is valued in the academy-hiring, reappointment, tenure, promotion, merit pay raises, professional recognition/awards. Our study, even though it was incomplete, raises doubts about the reliability of the peer review process and hinted at bias in favor of high-status authors and their institutions. To make this insinuation stronger required the very data that we were unable to collect-the publication outcome of previously rejected papers that were written by unknown authors from lower-status institutions when they were resubmitted with high-status names on them. But even without this component, our results raised the specter of an unreliable process in which the fate of a given manuscript being published was unreliable. When it was published in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1982, it was accompanied by approximately 50 commentaries, invited reactions from journal editors in all fields, not just psychology. Most of these reactions were positive, stating that our results should be embraced by the peer review system and lead to the abandonment of non-blind reviewing in which reviewers are told the identity of the authors before making their recommendations. Within a few years of our study's publication*, the APA changed from non-blinded reviews to blinded ones, citing our study as the impetus.