Peer Review and the Diffusion of Ideas

TL;DR

This paper reveals that peer review plays a crucial role in exposing reviewers to new ideas, which significantly influences their future citation behavior and promotes the diffusion of scientific knowledge.

Contribution

It uncovers a previously overlooked function of peer review in idea dissemination, using large-scale data to demonstrate its impact on reviewers' citation patterns.

Findings

Declining reviewers exposed to core ideas cite the manuscript more.

Exposure to ideas increases breadth and diversity of citations.

Peer review acts as a powerful engine for idea diffusion.

Abstract

This study examines a fundamental yet overlooked function of peer review: its role in exposing reviewers to new and unexpected ideas. Leveraging a natural experiment involving over half a million peer review invitations covering both accepted and rejected manuscripts, and integrating high-scale bibliographic and editorial records for 37,279 submitting authors, we find that exposure to a manuscript's core ideas significantly influences the future referencing behavior and knowledge of reviewer invitees who decline the review invite. Specifically, declining reviewer invitees who could view concise summaries of the manuscript's core ideas not only increase their citations to the manuscript itself but also demonstrate expanded breadth, depth, diversity, and prominence of citations to the submitting author's broader body of work. Overall, these results suggest peer review substantially influences the spread of scientific knowledge. Ironically, while the massive scale of peer review, entailing millions of reviews annually, often drives policy debates about its costs and burdens, our findings demonstrate that precisely because of this scale, peer review serves as a powerful yet previously unrecognized engine for idea diffusion, which is central to scientific advances and scholarly communication.