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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

#41

Post by hedora »

cperciva wrote: post #12
uptownfunk wrote: post #2

How is double blind not the norm? there is just too much room for bias

If you want a review to be truly double blind, you have to start censoring the paper -- things like "in previous work [1-10] we showed..." makes it obvious who the authors are even if you remove the names from the top of the paper.

"This work is based on the ideas of [1-10] which showed..."

(Also, it is a major red flag to cite 10 papers from one group and no related work from anyone else. Either the topic is completely irrelevant, or you didn't do a cursory literature search - at least skim the references from papers you cite!)

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

#42

Post by hedora »

cozzyd wrote: post #37
uptownfunk wrote: post #2

How is double blind not the norm? there is just too much room for bias

In my field that would be impossible... people work in collaborations and you know pretty much all of the experiments.

That's usually a consequence of too much nepotism, or some super expensive piece of equipment.

Double blind helps the former, though not the latter.

In a part of my field that is capital intensive, some well funded newcomers have recently invested a lot, and "broke in", while some incumbent testbeds went away; the "expensive equipment" problem is usually temporary if the field is expanding.

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

#44

Post by themodelplumber »

thfuran wrote: post #32
anonym29 wrote: post #3

"A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance, finds study." Lifehack discovered: legally change your name to that of a Nobel prizewinner if pursuing academia.

Hey, it's me, Niels Bohr.

I'd love to see this tested. Identical name; unique first name identical only; last name...it would be funny to see the results if this research is any indication.

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

#45

Post by mjfl »

anonym29 wrote: post #3

"A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance, finds study." Lifehack discovered: legally change your name to that of a Nobel prizewinner if pursuing academia.

priors matter, right?

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

#46

Post by hackerlight »

j7ake wrote: post #4

Is it any different to podcasts, concerts, and books? People will choose what they listen, see, or read heavily based on who the performer is. A performer who has consistently given good content will obviously have a bigger pull than a nobody still trying to get their first break.

Yes. The purpose of science is supposed to be finding the truth.

The identical paper being rejected more often based on the celebrity of the author isn't that.

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

#47

Post by cozzyd »

hedora wrote: post #42
cozzyd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my field that would be impossible... people work in collaborations and you know pretty much all of the experiments.

That's usually a consequence of too much nepotism, or some super expensive piece of equipment. Double blind helps the former, though not the latter. In a part of my field that is capital intensive, some well funded newcomers have recently invested a lot, and "broke in", while some incumbent testbeds went away; the "expensive equipment" problem is usually temporary if the field is expanding.

It's just that experiments in astroparticle physics are expensive and have lots of people on them. Like, how is the IceCube Collaboration supposed to write an anonymous paper? Even the most cursory description of the detector would give it away...

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

#48

Post by insightcheck »

ajmurmann wrote: post #39
didgetmaster wrote: post #6

It seems to me that some subjects are so specialized that the group that makes up one's 'peers' is fairly small. How do they have real anonymized reviews when it becomes easy to recognize the writings of the author? The more papers that someone writes, the easier it would be for their peers to recognize the writing style and other quirks that would give the author away.

I have a friend who is somewhat famous in his little research niche. Even when submitting papers for blind review he will do things like deliberately spell some words British and others American to make it harder for peers to figure out who the paper is from. The peer group is indeed small and rivalries happen quickly. Sometimes you know what other labs are doing very similar research and it's a race to publish first…

> "he will do things like deliberately spell some words British and others American to make it harder for peers to figure out who the paper is from."

This is a good initiative, but a catch is that if he's the only person deliberately spelling some words British and others American, the spelling choice becomes a unique identifier.

Though, it could work as long as no one within the group knows who is using the varied spelling.

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

#49

Post by prepend »

That’s odd. I don’t do a lot of peer review, but when I do the authors names are masked. Sometimes I can figure it out based on the citations, but I haven’t reviewed any papers where the author’s name is listed.

That being said an author isn’t published randomly in Nature, so I expect subsequent papers from an author to be better, on average, than non-Nature published authors.

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

#50

Post by nequo »

hedora wrote: post #43

I'm surprised that there are still non double blind publications that count for tenure cases. This does explain some of the recent and embarrassing [lack of] retractions of Nature papers though.

It is nearly impossible to enforce double blind peer review because of the existence of online pre-prints (hosted on arXiv, SSRN, or just the authors' websites). A referee can copy and paste from the text into DuckDuckGo and find the authors.
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