Anchoring effects in the assessment of papers: An empirical survey of citing authors
11.05.2023
In an article in PLOS ONE Lutz Bornmann, Christian Ganser and Alexander Tekles investigate the factors on which the evaluation of scientific articles depends. Using an experimental survey design, they focused on the question whether there are anchoring effects, i.e. whether numerical information presentend to the respndents influences their quality assessments.
The results show that assessments depend on citation impact information but not on information on the journal in which an article was published or irrelevant randomly generated numbers.