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In biology (my area), it is quite frequent for reviewers to "suggest" additional analyses/experiments that reference the the reviewers work or sub-field, which delays publication and inflates citations of reviewers. Thus, some people seem to make a strategy of volunteering for review to get more citations.

My understanding is that physics has used arXiv much longer and more consistently than biology has used bioRxiv, so communication suffers less from the impact of delayed (not just blocked) publication.

Physics is a smaller research community than biology, so it is not surprising that club effects have more pronounced. Some less funded sub-fields of biology definitely have that feel (e.g., ecology and evolution), but anything remotely biomedical seems to suffer from the rando reviewer effect much more.

In my experience, the historic "squishiness" of biology and the rapid growth of NIH funding (and hence graduate students mills) leads to a larger population of less rigorous thinkers than in physics. We don't have math requirements to filter those folks out.



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