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

First, the article talks about "double-blind reviewing" as being "logistically hard" because reviewers can "find the paper in a Google search", and talks about a "price tag". By contrast, many conferences around me implement so-called "lightweight double-blind" reviewing, which takes zero effort and just means that the authors and affiliations are not mentioned on the copy of the paper that reviewers read. I think this form of double-blind is a no-brainer, eliminating some bias with essentially no downside; and that discussions about the cost and complexity of double-blind reviewing are a distraction from this immediate improvement.

Here is a typical paragraph from a call for papers (here, STACS 2023) describing the policy:

  As in the previous two years, STACS 2023 will employ a lightweight double-blind reviewing process: submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. The purpose of the double-blind reviewing is to help PC members and external reviewers come to an initial judgment about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult. In particular, important references should not be omitted or anonymized. In addition, authors should feel free to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally would. For example, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web, submit them to arXiv, and give talks on their research ideas.

But you should also remember that "science" doesn't guarantee that _every_ paper is good. No one can. "90% of everything is crap" is a law of the universe as solid as the second principle of thermodynamics.

Science is a _process_ that is able to weed out the crap more efficiently than anything else we tried. Any big name can put out crap, true, but as soon as they do, there is an eager army of people who jumps at the opportunity of "proving X wrong". If the original paper was crap, that would be a pretty easy thing to do.

Note that I said "more efficiently", not "efficiently" in general. There will always be an army of people "trusting the science" (the authority, really) and so it might take time for the crap to be weeded out. But it will eventually, because science is like evolution: if nothing can be built on top of the crap, it will be progressively abandoned, because it can't reproduce (pun intended).

- when I was a researcher in Italy for an unknown lab, all of our articles were generally very scrutinized and went through years of reviews before publication

- when I worked in Michal Graetzel[1]'s laboratory things get published much more easily on more higher impact journals with less scrutiny. Not only most of the publications didn't really add much to the scientific knowledge, but they didn't even have the very high standards required when I was in Italy

Why is this bad? You get more funding the more you publish...So labs that publish easier due to the names involved get much more money...which they can use to publish even more and get even more money...which they can use to publish even more...

There's excellent scientists anywhere, really. But funding, fame and politics are extremely asymmetric in academia.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gr%C3%A4tzel