Some quality journals and conferences have double blind reviews now. So the work is reviewed without knowing who the work belongs to. It's not so much the polit

Some quality journals and conferences have double blind reviews now. So the work is reviewed without knowing who the work belongs to. It's not so much the politics of the system as the skills required to write a research paper being hard to learn outside of a PhD. You need to understand how to identify a line of work in a very narrow field so that you can cite prior work and demonstrate a proper understanding of how your work compares and contrasts to other closely related work. That's an important part of demonstrating your work is novel and it's hard to do (especially for the first time) without expert guidance. Most students trying this for the first time cite far too broadly (getting work that's somewhat related but not related to the core of their ideas) and miss important closely related work.