  What is the effect of releasing a preprint of a paper before it is submitted
for peer review? No randomized controlled trial has been conducted, so we turn
to observational data to answer this question. We use data from the ICLR
conference (2018--2022) and apply methods from causal inference to estimate the
effect of arXiving a paper before the reviewing period (early arXiving) on its
acceptance to the conference. Adjusting for confounders such as topic, authors,
and quality, we may estimate the causal effect. However, since quality is a
challenging construct to estimate, we use the negative outcome control method,
using paper citation count as a control variable to debias the quality
confounding effect. Our results suggest that early arXiving may have a small
effect on a paper's chances of acceptance. However, this effect (when existing)
does not differ significantly across different groups of authors, as grouped by
author citation count and institute rank. This suggests that early arXiving
does not provide an advantage to any particular group.
