Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

Post by sacrosancty » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 5:41 AM UTC

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #155

jedberg wrote: post #121

It blows my mind that peer reviews aren't done blind. Not only is there this geneder bias but also bias of "I know that person they're famous I'm sure their work is good" or "I've rejected their paper in the past". Seems like an easy fix would be to make all peer reviews blind. In fact, for any study that gets federal funding, they should have to publish their hypothesis ahead of time into an escrow system, submit th…

Academics just like every other aspect of human life is full of politics and this includes peer reviews as well. Papers regularly get panned for variety of reasons that have nothing to do with actual content of the paper and maybe even worse sometimes because the reviewer happen to be working on something similar and want secure a bigger grant for themselves.

Post by eurasiantiger » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #140

emacsen wrote: post #94

When I was an undergrad in college, I helped design a study on the role of gender perception in expertise. We had a piece of text that the subjects (undergrads) would read and rate the expertise of. We had the same text but we randomized whether the name would be a commonly male name, a commonly female name, or initials. We also randomized if they'd watch a clip of men's sports beforehand (men's basketball), women's…

That reminds me of a bias study where the researchers were investigating the effects of stereotypes. They told one group of Asian women that “women are worse at math than men” and another group of Asian women that “Asians are better at math than non-Asians”. Both are common stereotypes. They then measured how well the two groups did on subsequent math exercises. Interestingly, they found that the latter group (positi…

Post by inglor_cz » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 6:04 AM UTC

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #140

emacsen wrote: post #94

When I was an undergrad in college, I helped design a study on the role of gender perception in expertise. We had a piece of text that the subjects (undergrads) would read and rate the expertise of. We had the same text but we randomized whether the name would be a commonly male name, a commonly female name, or initials. We also randomized if they'd watch a clip of men's sports beforehand (men's basketball), women's…

That reminds me of a bias study where the researchers were investigating the effects of stereotypes. They told one group of Asian women that “women are worse at math than men” and another group of Asian women that “Asians are better at math than non-Asians”. Both are common stereotypes. They then measured how well the two groups did on subsequent math exercises. Interestingly, they found that the latter group (positi…

Post by probably_wrong » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 6:12 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #159

jedberg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever told you that about your cites is probably right -- you shouldn't cite yourself while calling out that you are citing yourself. You should cite yourself the same you that site any other work. The second part is probably unavoidable. If you're working on something super specialized when all your reviewers are the six other people who work on it then sure, it'll be unblinded. Not much we can do there sadly.

I disagree, the style to write as a "neutral" observer (often writing in passive voice) is frowned upon nowadays for good reason. Part of that is also that the information if the authors wrote a citation or not can be important to a reviewer. For example it is unfortunately quite common that authors publish results in a salami tactic to maximize the number of publications. There can be a significant difference in imp…

Post by lpolovets » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 6:24 AM UTC