📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

Research-active editors face a potential conflict of interest (COI) when handling submissions from authors who share the same affiliation or those who recently collaborated with the editor. Since perception of COIs arising from such editor-author associations may erode trust in science, some policies recommend, and others demand, recusal in such incidents. However, the effectiveness of such measures is unknown to date. To fill this gap, we analyze half a million papers from six publishers who specify the handling editor of each paper. We find numerous papers with editor-author associations, and demonstrate that such papers tend to be accepted faster. A quasi-experimental design exploiting policy changes at PNAS and PLOS reveals the limited effectiveness of current COI policies. A network neural embedding model reveals that requiring editors with potential COIs to recuse may compromise the suitability of the handling editor. Finally, an online survey experiment demonstrates that such COIs influence trust in the paper's finding, but public disclosure eliminates this effect.