Through the secret gate: a study of member-contributed submissions in PNAS

This work studies “Contributed” articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), a streamlined submission track for members of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS). We assess the characteristics and impact of those articles and the background and status of their authors, by comparing these articles to PNAS articles following the traditional editorial process. Analyzing over 46,000 articles published between 2007 and 2020, we find: Firstly, and perhaps most centrally, (1) Contributed articles generally appear in lower per-author citation deciles than Direct submissions, but are more likely to appear in the overall top citation deciles of authors; (2) PNAS-Contributed articles tend to spend less time in the review process than Direct submissions; (3) Direct submissions tend to be slightly higher cited than Contributed articles, which are particularly overrepresented amongst least-cited PNAS papers. Disciplinary differences were negligible; (4) authors with lower mean normalized citation scores are profiting most from articles published as Contributed papers, in terms of citation impact; (5) NAS members tend to publish most Contributed articles in the first years after becoming an NAS member, with men publishing more of these articles than women; (6) Contributing authors take up a unique niche in terms of authorship roles, mainly performing supervisory and conceptualisation tasks, without the administration and funding acquisition tasks usually associated with last authors.