NIPS & double blind reviewing

[Thomas G. Dietterich]

>>>>> "t" == tbreuel  <tbreuel at parc.com> writes:

    t> 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.    

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

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

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

I don't think this last remark is fair.  There is a huge potentially
relevant literature out there!  Do you know every paper published in
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, IEEE PAMI, Machine Learning,
Journal of Machine Learning Research, Statistical Science, Journal of
the American Statistical Association, Journal of Computatational and
Graphical Statistics, Technometrics, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, as well as the
proceedings of all of the relevant conferences?

I don't!

    t> Thomas.

I'm not opposed to blind reviewing, but I think you must admit that
knowing the author's name makes it much easier to check whether they
have previously published a similar article!

--Tom