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One of my faculty, during a lecture, told the following lines
some good journals and conferences even consider the country of authors and sometimes they think that the research papers from a particular country may be not good. So, we need to be more careful while writing the paper and regarding its novelty.
Is his claim true? Does the reviewers and editors of the journal consider the country as one of the factors in the decision?
I am not sure that I ever seen any substantiation statistical research on it, but it is definitely believed that researchers from some countries are under pressure to generate large quantities of research papers, but not necessarily under the same pressure regarding the quality of their research. The lists are subjective and vary from one researcher to another, but often include China, India, Russia and post-Soviet countries, etc. So, yes, peer-reviewers may have a subconscious bias against research papers from these countries. This bias may be further amplified by the language barrier — if the paper is written in sub-par English, it may reflect on the perception of research explained in the paper.
However, reviewers should not allow their bias to affect their decision and there are systems in place to ensure they don't. Good journals have good policies which encourage reviewers to work with their bias and also involve a diverse panel of reviewers to consider the merits of the paper more objectively.
Regarding your last statement, yes, it is always good to carefully check your paper before submission and stress the novelty and usefulness of the proposed research idea.
You won't find any editor willing to say that they are influenced by the authors' country. It's both something that's politically incorrect and something that people don't want to think is true for them. But that's not to say subconscious bias doesn't exist. Similar to gender bias, nobody is willing to say they're biased, but somehow, at some level, they exhibit biased behavior.
I'd say that there is some level of bias in respect to an author's country, but it's small and no "good journals and conferences" will ever state that they consider the author's country in a negative way (they might, however, consider the authors' country in a positive way, viz. "authors from developing countries are especially encouraged to submit").
When reviewing a paper, you subconsciously have an expectation of how good it is. If you know previous work by the authors and liked that work, you expect to find good work in the paper under review (and you are much more disappointed if this expectation is not fulfilled). This can affect the way the paper is read and hence the review as well. Similarly, the institution names of the authors induce some expectation of quality if the institution is known to the reviewer. Double-blind review is supposed to minimize this effect, but there are always some hints left in the paper.
Now a western reviewer may be less likely to know for the majority of Asian institutions how well-reputed they are. This means that the authors do not get a subconscious bonus here. This is normally not a big deal if the paper is good enough, but for journals with low acceptance rates, this can be problematic for papers that are close to the borderline of acceptance.
Likewise, language may be a big deal here. For instance, experienced US-American reviewers may have seen all the usual writing errors that French, Italian, and German native speakers typically make, and because of this these do not obstruct their understanding of the paper content. But for the typical errors made by Asians, this may be different, and a reviewer who is not certain about the meaning of some statements in the paper is just less likely to write a very supportive review. Local customs in structuring the paper and building up a compelling argument may also lead to a similar effect.
