Referee Comments and Responses

This section describes this paper's path through review. We share the substantive parts of editors' reports (with permission), and explain how they shaped our changes to the paper. We tried to use AI to extract and share the substantive content of the referee reports, but after many attempts, we could not coax even the best language models to adequately summarize the main ideas.

What we submitted (Dec 18, 2025) Manuscript ↗

Our first submission to REStat was similar to our 5th and 6th submissions to REStud and PNAS. It had an economic model and a genetic simulation, which we eventually dropped. For this submission, we removed the analysis of characteristics of commuting zones that produced U.S. laureates, as it was suggestive at best, and several past referees had found it unconvincing.

Editor's comments (Mar 4, 2026)

• R1: Not disclosed
• R2: Not disclosed
• R3: Not disclosed

[We are not sharing the editor's letter as this paper is still under review at REStat.]

How we changed the paper

[see next page]