This paper explores whether journal referees take into account the author's scholarly credentials in their decisions using the stochastic process underlying the Yule-Simon distribution as a descriptive model of the peer-review process. We provide evidence that referees consider the author's publication record valuable information in their decision-making, and such referee behavior helps improve the efficacy of the peer-review process. We show that the probability that a newly accepted paper in a given journal is written by authors with no prior publications is lower for top journals, specialty journals, journals with higher Eigenfactor or Article Influence Score, and journals with more publications.

本文探讨了期刊审稿人在做出决定时是否考虑了作者的学术资历，使用尤尔-西蒙分布背后的随机过程作为同行评审过程的描述模型。我们提供的证据表明，审稿人认为作者的出版物在他们的决策中记录了有价值的信息，这种审稿行为有助于提高同行评审过程的效率。我们发现，对于顶级期刊、专业期刊、特征因子或文章影响力得分较高的期刊以及发表论文较多的期刊，给定期刊中新接受的论文由之前没有发表过论文的作者撰写的概率较低。