Every paper Albert Einstein submitted to anonymous peer review was rejected.
(he had only one peer anonymous reviewed paper and it had an error)
Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
71–80 of 319 posts
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#72I'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.
Just to add more to the siblings. Research is inherently social. In a small field you can even guess the reviewers. Sometimes there is the "oh yeah that professor talks like that. It's definitely her writing me this review" moment, and reviews are supposed to be anonymous at least in most of the venues. Unfortunately the social dynamics and trust in some cases extend too far -- many sloppy research get published due to trust or favoritism. Double-blind makes this a bit better, but beyond this, at a certain point you will be changing what research is about from a social enterprise to something much more result oriented.
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#73"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.
Old news from 2016 Jobseekers with Anglo-Saxon, easy to pronounce and common names are the most likely to get to the interview stage compared to candidates with unfamiliar names, according to research by the Australian National University published in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/unusual-nam...
I was really confused because when I last looked at academic job postings it was in Medieval Studies.
“Jobseekers with Anglo-Saxon” means “candidates who speak Anglo-Saxon.”
And I’m like “I thought that was just a medieval studies thing, but I guess the older languages really do help …”
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably inherent to any site that allows you to follow individuals. For Twitter that's not much of a problem because most people know better than to rely on Twitter for life advice or product reviews. Letterboxd, on the other hand, manifests exactly the problem you're talking about, and the whole point of the site is to assign purported ratings to film and TV shows. Reddit and IMDb are mostly immune. Which is n…
Reddit seems to try and change that, though? I don’t really follow what development happens on new reddit, but it seems more user-oriented?
They have been _trying_ to make it more user oriented for a while but even in the new design, users aren't really that important or recognized any more than they always have.
The main change is you can post posts to your profile rather than a particular subreddit. But that's not a big feature. Back in the day people used to just create a subreddit of their username.
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#75Fairness and efficiency are often at odds. As a reviewer, I was sometimes asked to review papers from unknown authors at unknown institutions. My level of effort was likely proportional to how well I knew the quality of the institution from which the paper came. There is a great deal of time involved in understanding a paper well enough to do a full review.
It's true, unfortunately. When I was a TA and graded homework I'd learn which students did well over time and generally would put less effort into checking their work because generally it was more likely to be correct. They were also more likely to self-correct, and to present work well, etc. Reviewing papers isn't really too different.
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#76I'm not sure what we're supposed to find astonishing about academics (like most of humanity) being vulnerable to reputation biases in their reasoning.
As in, that would be the null hypothesis. It would be astonishing if most academics overcame it.
EDIT: apparently, the size of the effect (factor of six more likely to be accepted if it came from a Nobel Prizewinner) is larger than anticipated.
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Old news from 2016 Jobseekers with Anglo-Saxon, easy to pronounce and common names are the most likely to get to the interview stage compared to candidates with unfamiliar names, according to research by the Australian National University published in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/unusual-nam...
Surely they didn't mean actual Anglo-Saxon names, right? Those name are so challenging to the modern english-hearing ear. https://www.behindthename.com/names/usage/anglo-saxon
Æðelwulf wrote a heck of a quicksort on the whiteboard under the gun last week.
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#78A 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 said. And, as I later found out, that seems to be the main intention[1]:
The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, our editor from 1938 to 1956, anonymity keeps the editor "not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself…it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle."
[1]: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/04/...
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#79That an economist finds human behaviour that every normal human would expect "astonishing" is itself not remotely astonishing.
Peer review is not supposed to be a Twitter popularity contest so these numbers are indeed astonishing.
Yet most non-economists would have predicted exactly this. If it's astonishing to you, well, perhaps you've had the misfortune to learn to think like an economist (ie. poorly & very muddy about normative vs actual).
Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study
#80https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen#Schlangemann
> In 2008, in response to a series of Call-for-Paper e-mails, SCIgen was used to generate a false scientific paper titled Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce, using "Herbert Schlangemann" as the author. The article was accepted at the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE 2008), co-sponsored by the IEEE, to be held in Wuhan, China, and the author was invited to be a session chair on grounds of his fictional Curriculum Vitae.