How Does Theory Change During Peer Review: An Empirical Study of Quantitative Sociology

• In Event: 431 - Regular Session. Sociology of Knowledge: Organizing Scholarly Knowledge

Abstract

Peer review is a central institution in sociological research, yet its workings and effects on research remain opaque. Empirical investigations have (1) been rare because data on the peer review process are generally unavailable to researchers, and (2) conceptualized peer review as a panel of gate-keepers who either accept or reject a manuscript, overlooking peer review’s role in constructing articles. The present paper uses a novel empirical strategy to study how manuscripts change during peer review. Authors of published sociological research often present earlier versions of that research at annual meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Many of these annual meetings papers are publicly available and tend to be only minimally peer reviewed. I link a sample of these papers to the versions published in two peer-reviewed journals, American Sociological Review and Social Forces. The article pairs thus approximately represent cases of sociological research before and after peer review, permitting one to observe its effects. Previous research (presented below) demonstrated that manuscripts tend to change much more substantially in their theoretical framing than in the data analyses. The finding suggests that a chief effect of peer review in quantitative sociology is to prompt authors to adjust their theoretical framing. This study (the research for which is on-going) concentrates on the latter adjustments: What common trajectories do theoretical claims manifest as they undergo during peer review?

Author

• Mikhail Teplitskiy, University of Chicago