NIPS & double blind reviewing

[tbreuel@parc.com]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 12:57:55PM -0800, S. Becker wrote:
> Two of the key factors NIPS reviewers are asked to comment on are a 
> paper's significance and originality. Very often work is submitted to NIPS  
> that is only a marginal advancement over the author's previous 
> work, or worse yet, the same paper has already appeared at another 
> conference or in a journal. In the course of reviewing for NIPS I have 
> often looked at an author's web page, past NIPS proceedings etc to assess 
> the closeness to the author's previously published work.  Double-blind 
> reviewing would make it much more difficult to detect this sort of thing.    

Originality needs to be judged relative to the entire published
literature anyway.  If the reviewer is familiar with the literature,
that determination should not require knowing who the author is.

In different words, it doesn't matter whether Smith's submission to NIPS
is very similar to Smith's previous submission to some other conference
or merely very similar to Jones's submission to some other conference,
and a reviewer familiar with the literature should know both Smith's
and Jones's prior work.

If the reviewer needs to know the identity of the author in order to
find prior work in the area, I think the reviewer is not sufficiently
qualified to review the paper in the first place.

Thomas.