We all know that its easier to publish if you belong to one of the "top" schools in USA or a few outside. No one has carried out an experiment though -- just to check how strong the affiliation bias is.
As someone said "good papers are written by good people. Good people are those who write good papers". There lies the root of the problem! Once you establish a reputation with one good paper, you're done basically -- you get a job in a top school and then you can keep publishing in top journals for the rest of your life.
Of course only someone like me who is OUTSIDE the club would rant about it! The great thing is that it wont matter who does rant, unless you're on the inside....
Then look at Oxford and Cambridge. For some reason they became famous at some point and there was no looking back...now the best students will go there and it will not matter if the upstart universities are better staffed or not -- the reputation will persist. That means good teachers would be attracted there and so on and so forth. Can anyone ever break this persistence? Can a new university do better? Not if it is competing with the same or lower resources than Oxford...
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