A correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous asks:
Since you publish a lot of papers, I wonder if you’ve ever come across this issue. Journal reviews are supposed to be double-blind, but authors always have great familiarity with their own work, and cite it frequently. So what is the sense of sending an “anonymized” review copy to a journal editor when a line like “In a previous paper (Smith and Jones, 1999) we showed that …” lets you know right away that Smith and Jones are the authors of the paper being reviewed?
I have thought about altering the review copy to make it look we are citing a paper by someone else [“In a previous paper, Smith and Jones (1999) showed that…”]. Should I even worry about this? How do you handle it?
My reply: I don’t think it matters much. If the rules say to anonymize the references, then I do so, but I don’t really worry whether a reviewer can figure out whether it is me writing the article. From the other direction, I review lots of articles (more than I write, actually), and I am very rarely curious enough to bother trying to figure out (for example, using Google) who is writing them.
What bothers me more, actually, is the idea that somebody out there is submitting a crappy article but citing me in such a way that the reviewers think I wrote it. The other thing I worry about is when I review an article negatively, that the authors might be able to figure out that I’m the reviewer. Or, that someone else is reviewing an article negatively and in the review points to my work, leading the author to think that I’m being the bad guy.
P.S. Somebody once told me about triple-blind submission, where even the author doesn’t know who wrote the article. Apparently this is standard in medical research.
P.P.S. More thoughts here.
>>P.S. Somebody once told me about triple-blind submission, where even the author doesn't know who wrote the article. Apparently this is standard in medical research.
The author, or the editor? I'm a little confused about how one could hide who wrote the article from the author.
Alex, articles in medical journals can have many, many authors. I am looking at one right now written by the "Prospective Studies Collaboration". The full list of authors takes up about half a page in the journal, in very small type. Probably close to a hundred names there.
I thought Andrew might be referring to the practice of big pharma "ghost writing" the articles for the investigators. This has been something of a scandal in the medical journals.
Here's one example:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/04/0504…
Don Rubin once gave me the advice: Never put your name on something you haven't read.
This is a question?
It's quite simple. When citing yourself, write "author".
"In a previous paper (Authors, 1999) we showed that…" That's how we do it on 120th Street.
Problem solved?
I don't see how ceolaf's solution works. For example,
"In a previous paper (Authors, 1999), we proved the Riemann hypothesis, and in this paper show its relevance to Bayesian statistics."
would cite
'Authors (1999) A proof of the Riemann hypothesis'
– which it's going to be very easy to unmask. (I actually like the original solution)
I have found that when the referee points out a couple of references, both by the same author that they think I should have included … and when I look at the papers, they're at best very marginally relevant – it's not at all hard to figure out who that referee was, either. I've had something like this happen on maybe a quarter of my papers.
I know of one case where a reviewer went on an angry rant about a paper, saying it should be rejected because the author didn't cite enough papers from Person X. Of course, Person X turned out to be the overly modest author, who had been trying to keep self-citations down. Luckily the conference chair stepped in and the paper was accepted.
"Or, that someone else is reviewing an article negatively and in the review points to my work, leading the author to think that I'm being the bad guy."
That has happened to me: I saw other reviews of a paper when it was sent back for re-review, and one was a very negative comment stating that I have already addressed the main point of the manuscript. While the fact that at least one other person has apparently read my earlier paper made me feel good, I am pretty sure that the author must have concluded that I wrote the negative review. In fact, I felt that further exposition of the issue was useful, and wrote a generally positive review (without even mentioning that I have already brought it up).
Aniko
Most Computer Vision related conferences suggest to keep the anonymity as described here in sec. 1.3:
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/s.prince/bmvc2009/b…
I was once asked to "ghostwrite" a paper without knowing who the attributed author was going to be. Maybe they did not know who was being asked and then would be blinded.
Keith
Something of a rambling comment follows. I didn't want to be greedy and split it into three.
In my editing role, I once had reviewer #1 say [something like] "This paper is crappy because it ignores the important work of Author X, this paper should take the work of Author X into account, and change their analysis".
I imagine that the authors thought that reviewer #1 was Author X. However, reviewer #2 was Author X, who said "This is a great paper and should be published with a couple of typos fixed."
One moral to be taken from this is that you might think you know who the reviewers are, but there's a reasonable chance you're wrong.
One way of thinking about peer review (and I can't remember where I read this) is that it exists to stop authors embarrassing themselves. I occasionally get papers where I'm fairly sure that I know who the author is, and I'm fairly sure that it's someone I consider a friend. I don't want my friend to publish a crappy paper, and I wouldn't be doing them a favor if I said 'It's great, publish it' when it obviously had problems.
Also when editing, I'm not always sure that a reviewer hasn't worked with the author of the paper in the past. I ask them to review it anyway, and then I find one review that says "It's great publish it", and almost nothing else (not even a typo), and another reviewer that has a 5 page review detailing problems. When that happens, I'm tempted to find another reviewer (but given my second point, I don't think they are doing the authors a favor.)
After three years of editing Series B, my conclusion is that we should go the other way, ie no-blind referring, and remove anonymity from the referees as well! This has drawbacks, as well, but it helps in (a) not botching the review process with a one-line evaluation and (b) using only "objective" arguments in the review, while avoiding pointing to one's own work unless necessary. (To be fair, I have not seen this name-dropping happen so often.)
At least in some Earth and environmental sciences, the shift seems to be towards reviewers identifying themselves, either as standard or optionally. I have seen this as acting mostly positively:
1. There is increased constraint on being vicious if who you are becomes public.
2. Self-promotion is more transparent.
3. The ideal kind of referee who is careful and critical but also constructive about publishable work is rewarded by authors' awareness of their contributions.
4. Silly guessing games are eliminated.
This need _not_ be associated with low standards. It is even associated with the best journals.
I have been very happy to thank reviewers of my papers by name in the final version whenever that has been possible.
However, I think the main problem is reviewing essentially unpublishable stuff. It is tempting to choose anonymity if you are explaining how bad something is to its authors.