Estimating the Causal Effect of Early ArXiving on Paper Acceptance

TL;DR

This study uses causal inference methods on observational data from ICLR to estimate how early arXiving influences paper acceptance, accounting for confounders like topic and author quality, and finds a small, non-discriminatory effect.

Contribution

It introduces a causal inference approach with negative outcome control to assess the impact of early arXiving on paper acceptance, addressing confounding factors.

Findings

Early arXiving has a small positive effect on acceptance.

The effect does not significantly vary across author groups.

Using citation count as a control helps mitigate quality confounding.

Abstract

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.