Differential response of core and peripheral GRE papers

Determine whether papers whose core research questions concern gender, race, or the environment responded differently to the 2025 U.S. policy shock than papers in which gender-, race-, or environment-related content is peripheral to another research question.

Background

The paper decomposes the decline in gender, race, and environment (GRE) content into papers whose central research question concerns one of those topics and papers that use GRE-related terms only peripherally. This decomposition is intended to distinguish substantive shifts in research topics from lexical changes in how otherwise unchanged research is described.

Although the authors find that a substantial portion of the decline comes from papers with GRE-related core questions, the estimated core and peripheral effects are not statistically distinguishable. The paper therefore leaves unresolved whether the policy shock affected these two types of papers differently.

References

We therefore cannot say whether core and peripheral papers responded differently.

— Science under Threat? A Natural Experiment in Economics  (2608.14164 - Rohner et al., 14 Aug 2026) in Section 4, “Mechanisms,” paragraph “Core versus peripheral research questions”