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

nature.com

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

#181

Post by wallmountedtv »

magicalhippo wrote: post #78

A while back I subscribed for The Economist on a whim. I'm not really into economics, but I felt they provided a nice alternative view of what was going on elsewhere in the world compared to what the local news here in Norway reported. One thing I quickly noticed was that the articles were never signed by the authors directly. I found this striking, but also refreshing. It caused me to pay more attention to what was…

Norway really has a huge issue of sensationalism in local papers, and it does not help that even the government funded NRK is deep into sensationalism as well.

Opening NRK right now gives "Now the government must see the madness in this", "Electricity prices can make going to the cinema more expensive", and "He is so tired" as the top articles for today.

I follow so much International/American news thanks to publications like Reuters, AP, and Qz. But no matter how much time or money I use, I can not follow my own country's news. I definitely am not alone in this, and it terrifies me how unworried most of Norway seems to be about this fact as well.

Its a ticking time bomb.

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

#182

Post by eldenwrong »

geysersam wrote: post #170
chatterhead wrote: post #66

We have to come to terms with this. Academia was bought and paid for long ago and the money was used to build an incredibly broken and overly political bureaucratic engine of scholarly and scientific work that doesn't get anywhere near as much peer-review scrutiny as it should and commands far more respect in politics and legal proceedings than we should allow. Universities and experts are the best we can do sometime…

Agree. It's stagnant, fearful and bureaucratic. "Trust the science" never changed anyones mind. However, I think your climate change example is a bit strange. If anything, it's big oil who's been trying to sell the idea that we don't have to stop using fossile fuels. Hiding evidence, and spreading confusion by paying lobbyists and scientists. Global warming was proved beyond reasonable doubt decades ago.

Climate change is one of the most politicized fields at the moment.

Any questioning it, even slightly means being banned from grants and academia.

Its also interesting that most climate models are NOT open source. Most recorded data from satellites is also NOT open source. So everyone works with a pre cleaned data set.

Its also worth pointing out that data sets like HadCRUT have never been audited by any respected scientist/group of scientists. This data was collected in stations not meant for long term measurements and they have a lot of errors. Just download it yourself and see. (Climate scientists are not really data experts, since they go from clean datasets in school to "clean" data sets in real life)

Calculating global temperature is also one of those things that is done in quite an obscure way, extrapolating too much IMO.

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

#183

Post by popol12 »

After reading the article, I feel like the HN title should rather be « Authors’ status » instead of « Authors’ names ». I expected the study to be about gender inequalities but it’s actually about author prestige (is the author famous or not). I often just read HN title without reading the underlying article, and I wonder how many times I’ve got wrong in my interpretation of what the core of the information was

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

#184

Post by concordDance »

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…

> Our small study showed what you'd expect- students- men and women students rated male writers more highly than female writers, and initials were right in the middle, though they tended to be more like responses for men.

How much more? That's really important.

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

#185

Post by LtWorf »

scifibestfi wrote: post #164
KennyBlanken wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if Knuth decided to post some utter garbage chances are it would accepted based on his name alone. You mean like Elon Musk? When he came up with that giant box to extract kids from a cave with passages so narrow rescuers couldn't wear their air tanks on them, they had to push them ahead of themselves, reddit and HN and twitter were full of people defending him. There were even people defending him when…

How about Bill Gates, who apparently is an expert in public health, viruses, vaccines, epidemiology, etc? Smart people like Bill, Elon and the CEO of Brave are polymaths and can cross domains quite easily.

They can't.

Musk is just a guy getting rich via insider trading. Gates is most likely using his foundation to push his interests.

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

#187

Post by ahartmetz »

Ma8ee wrote: post #141
keithwinstein wrote: post #124

Double-anonymous/blind reviewing is completely standard in most areas of computer science, e.g. networking (SIGCOMM, NSDI, IMC, HotNets, MobiCom, MobiSys), systems (OSDI, SOSP, USENIX ATC, HotOS), security (Usenix Security, S&P), machine learning (NeurIPS and ICML), graphics and HCI (SIGGRAPH and CHI), and at least some top-tier theory conferences (like FOCS). So I think most computer scientists would agree with the…

I’m confused about your second point: isn’t the reader the one who gains the most from reading the best papers, independently of who’s the author?

I think grandparent is suffering from the current academic environment where the main(!) purpose of a paper is getting career points.

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

#189

Post by cosmojg »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #176
MilanTodorovic wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is, at least in my experience, that you read such things once from a reputable source and never check it again.

When I was studying undergrad psych, Psychology Today was falling into disrepute. Are they still a reputable source, today?

Isn't that one of those clickfarm blogs?

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

#190

Post by techas »

Good that the study is done and it gets published. But the result is obvious and well known. The terrible part is that the solution is also well known (double blind process) but there is no interest to implement it in most journals. Editors have to defend their field from outsiders… editorials do not care as long as money keeps flowing in…
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