double blind review

[Michael Herrmann]

Another objection contra double blind review and a reason pro triple blind
review (the reviewer does not know whether the identity of the author is
hidden):

Even if authors are not allowed to explicitely mention their names they
cannot be prevented from revealing their identity indirectly. They will be
able to do so if they are well known to the community, and they will tend
to do so if they believe this increases the probability of acceptance.
Therefore double blind reviewing could introduce a bias against younger
scientists and researchers from other fields. One may even suspect that
the reason that journals or conferences stay with double blind reviewing
once it was adopted, is that people of influence are quite happy with this
bias.

On the other hand, history of science tells that many now famous scholars
used pseudonyms if they had reasons to be afraid of an unjust acceptance
by the community. The program committee should thus consider to allow for
fake identities during the review process. Authors who wish to make use of
this opportunity should be willing to take some extra effort and to manage
to arrange things such that the paper does not need to be rewritten when
the true identity is revealed after acceptance of the manuscript.

This would also help to reduce the bias in favor of well-known authors
because the very famous names are likely to have been hijacked by someone
else. It is unlikely that such an opportunity will be overused also
because there is always a chance that the reviewer realizes that the
identity is faked and tends to be more critical in such cases.

Michael (?)

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* Dr. J. Michael Herrmann        Georg August University Goettingen *
* Tel. : +49 (0)551 5176424      Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics   *
* Fax  : +49 (0)551 5176439      Bunsenstr. 10, D-37073 Goettingen  *
* EMail: michael at chaos.gwdg.de   http://www.chaos.gwdg.de           *
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