Reputation or peer review? The role of outliers

We present an agent-based model of paper publication and consumption that allows to study the effect of two different evaluation mechanisms, peer review and reputation, on the quality of the manuscripts accessed by a scientific community. The model was empirically calibrated on two data sets, mono- and multi-disciplinary. Our results point out that disciplinary settings differ in the rapidity with which they deal with extreme events—papers that have an extremely high quality, that we call outliers. In the mono-disciplinary case, reputation is better than traditional peer review to optimize the quality of papers read by researchers. In the multi-disciplinary case, if the quality landscape is…