Bias against scientific novelty: A prepublication perspective

Abstract

Abstract Novel ideas often experience resistance from incumbent forces. While evidence of the bias against novelty has been widely identified in science, there is still a lack of large‐scale quantitative work to study this problem occurring in the prepublication process of manuscripts. This paper examines the association between manuscript novelty and handling time of publication based on 778,345 articles in 1,159 journals indexed by PubMed. Measuring the novelty as the extent to which manuscripts disrupt existing knowledge, we found systematic evidence that higher novelty is associated with longer handling time. Matching and fixed‐effect models were adopted to confirm the statistical significance of this pattern. Moreover, submissions from prestigious authors and institutions have the advantage of shorter handling time, but this advantage is diminishing as manuscript novelty increases. In addition, we found longer handling time is negatively related to the impact of manuscripts, while the relationships between novelty and 3‐ and 5‐year citations are U‐shape. This study expands the existing knowledge of the novelty bias by examining its existence in the prepublication process of manuscripts.