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

> Writing about your own work in third person has nothing to do with using the passive voice. You can use the active voice just fine: "Papers X,Y,Z show that ..." works regardless of the identity of the authors of X,Y,Z So the style argument is wrong.

I agree that writing in third person about your work is not the same as writing in passive voice. It is part of the same style trying to give an impression of objectivity despite the fact that you did the work.

Essentially you are trying to hide the information that you authored the papers, and did the work. Just compare "In paper X,Y,Z the authors show the importance of proper citing" or "In paper X,Y,Z we show the importance of proper citing". Don't tell me that you would not evaluate the 2 sentences differently.

> The other argument you have is also questionable. It doesn't matter at all the identity of the citer when using citations to argue that a topic of research is important. If you cite 20 papers and they are mostly from the very same author, it doesn't matter if you're the author: any reviewer will realize the claim is shaky -- or not, if all those papers happens to be actually outstanding.

Sure if there are 20 citations it's very obviously shaky, but often enough cases are not quite so clear cut. I still believe one should not deliberately hide information.

> Double blind is imperfect but miles better than single blind. And we shouldn't list made-up defects that don't stand to scrutiny to it.

Just so I don't get misunderstood, I'm not arguing against double blind, we should always do it and I have been advocating for it in several settings. I just say we should not suddenly change the way we write papers, so not to accidentally reveal our identity to the reviewers. That approach will make papers more difficult to read and write with questionable benefit.

I find it ironic that this is published in Nature. In may experience Nature journals are amongst the worst with respect to peer review.

In my field they seem to draw from a very limited set of reviewers (often senior academics who have not worked in the specific field in quite a while). We have been criticised with very outdated information. This is worse because editors are not experts, we had a reviewer contradict textbook established science and when we asked for an additional reviewer, they send it back to the same person.

Even worse, their goal is not publishing good science, they want to sell journals. While they will never publicly admit it, I know that they take the into account the reputation of an author in their decision to send it out to reviewers (for those who don't know, in the high impact journals like science or nature, the biggest hurdle is typically getting the editors accept the paper and send the paper out to review).

> But you should also remember that "science" doesn't guarantee that _every_ paper is good.

That's correct and I agree. Actual Science doesn't require trust. As you aptly pointed out it's excellent at weeding out crap most of the time. The issue is the academic politics involved in it make it harder to determine if the process is weakened. The problem of course comes when a major result was not reviewed appropriately and it becomes the standard until someone is brave enough to write another paper failing to reproduce it. That's the scary thing - even if someone is brave enough to write a paper saying its non-reproducible they still have to get through the review committee to have their voice heard. Sure, they could post to Arxiv or a blog if all else fails...but none of that will ever get picked up where it is needed most.

> There will always be an army of people "trusting the science" (the authority, really)

This is really the crux of it. It's appeal to authority. Even higher order thinking people (that is, those outside pop-sci nonsense) fall victim to this because it's human nature. The authority is also how mediocre work gets past reviewers by attaching a name to it.

I don't think this is the case. The point of science as one commenter pointed out is a lack of trust (or faith). Hence the need for pages and pages of sources, concerted efforts on reproducibility, etc. In certain fields reproducibility is extremely important and a single scientific article should be taken with extreme skepticism until it's reproduced several times. I think this is the thing that's often skipped. A single article being published in a journal is not a sign of changing times. If there's no attempts to reproduce it we have an idea of something, but no idea if it works (really). Often times this lack of reproducibility is associated with so-called corporate "science" (Phillip Morris, from another example I posted).

I hesitate to use the word faith at all, even when describing the scientific process itself. Having faith in the process leads to (for lack of a better phrase) a failure to trust, but verify. IMO, it is one thing to approach scientific literature with a trusting demeanor and still walk through the proper processes to verify the results, and another thing entirely to literally take the author's word. Often times especially when big names are attached we aren't trusting-and-verifying we are simply taking their word. That's a problem that weakens the credibility of science.

I don't want to come off as someone who disregards everything he doesn't like. However, I do approach science with great pessimism and have since graduate school. Not because I hate it, or something is wrong with the scientific method, but because approaching it pessimistically allowed me to write better work by forcing me to actually perform the method instead of p-hacking my way to a result.

I think this is the best point here.

Reviewing is hard work with very few rewards - and you have to decide at the start whether it is worth your time to embark on it. Ideally we would like to learn something from the paper.

I and most people here would most likely strongly prefer to review a paper written by someone good at what they do.

In reality most papers are pretty bad - thus when we prefer reviewing papers written by Nobel prize winners we are not "biased" and "humbly bowing" before their greatness - we are just trying to make it worth our while.