I don't understand this. Don't you have blind peer review?

In my discipline, most journals even have double blind peer review. I thought that's the standard.

> Don't you have blind peer review?

It's fundamentally impossible because when you publish the topics are going to be in a way or another niche enough that you know all of the people working on those topics and conferences make those circles even more public.

Say that you are studying e.g. "helical peptides", which is a vague and broad term on one side, on the other one, all the people that work on specific aspects of helical peptides (say, using them to bind surfaces that are very different in polarization, e.g. batteries) know each other and blind review would add nothing really. Even when it is blind you likely know who's reviewing it most of the time.

There are topics that are of course wider.

To make a comparison with programming: imagine you're involved in an open source community with a language that is niche enough that you know most of the people involved in it (it is common for many lisp dialects).

You can likely be given a program in that language and figure out likely who wrote it due to their interests, programming or api designing, or the use of static types, or some kind of linting that you know only a handful of people use, background, etc.

With the huge difference that in case of science the circles are much smaller because you know all your peers are in academia, who of them has specific instruments (not everyone has the same lab equipment), but who doesn't also have some others, you may know that some of your peers have their niche and "main branches" of research so you figure those things much easier. Also, in those circles you also know who is involved in your "code reviews" so if you know that A and B aren't reviewing it (you know they would've told you) it can only be C, D and E, but the feedback requesting this kind of experiment could only come from "C"...

But this is contradictory. Can you explain?

On the one hand are famous scientists who have wide influence, on the other hand are small academic circles working on obscure, niche topics where everyone knows each other so well that blind review is impractical.

How can one scientist be both so reknowned that their name tilts the balance of grant money unfairly away from other less known researchers, and at the same time their research is so specific that only a very few others can even comment on their work?

It is likely a relative matter. “Famous scientists” still tend to be famous within a rather small subset of even other scientists who are in a similar niche, no matter how large that niche is. It is the intensity of engagement of that community that likely makes it nearly impossible to even not tell exactly who wrote something, simply by the writing style.

An analogy may be how heavy readers can immediately tell which author of their particular topic area they are reading, based on a short excerpt. It is what makes alternative noms de plumes almost impossible, especially now with systematic and documenting AI.

I moved from CS to an experimental field where there is no blind review, and I don't buy these arguments. Most experimental fields are sufficiently large that when you submit an article to e.g. Nature, reviewers don't necessarily know who you are.

Even some Ivy League universities are now requiring blinded applications for faculty positions and they have double-blind reviews to avoid bias, e.g. hiring a graduate from Oxford instead of no-name university.

I can name a dozen people who, for anyone in my field, are extremely famous - to the point of if you meet and talk to them at a conference, it'll be the talk of the lab for weeks afterwards and everyone will gush about how cool it is that you got to meet them and talk to them.

If I walk two corridors over - still in my department, but just a slightly different aspect of the field - they won't even recognize the name.

>It's fundamentally impossible because when you publish the topics are going to be in a way or another niche enough that you know all of the people working on those topics

Even if you know the people in the field and you can guess the authors, double blind does not hurt. Actually, I don’t see any downside of double blind.

Actually, names are very often used to let you out of the field if you are not part of the usual family…

You can't see any downside of double blind?

There are many systems we use which provide anonymity, and they always result in some form of abuse. Such as phone numbers (scam calls), Internet (cyber harassment, scams, viruses), cryptocurrency (all the scams). Any system where humans can gain advantages from abusing anonymity they do so.

I'm not an academic so maybe there are already safe guards, but from my understanding people already cut any research into as many small papers as they can. Truly double blind peer review would likely encourage this. Maybe it would also further encourage people to steal research or peer review outside of their expertise.

The benefits may outweigh the negatives, but I'm sure people will find a way to abuse it too, consciously or not.

I don't understand what you're trying to insinuate and how negative effects can arise. We have double blind review in all major journals.

1. If a reviewer recognizes the author without declining the review, the result cannot be worse than without blind review. A difference would only be if the names of the reviewers are also not anonymous, but this creates much worse problems and would seriously jeopardize the review process.

2. If a reviewer doesn't recognize a dupe or paper very similar to one already published, then the reviewer is not competent and the journal has a problem with the reviewer pool or reviewer selection. That is a problem in any case, and is the reason why bad quality journals exist.

3. If the reviewer is incompetent, unfair or even insulting, then the author will complain to the editorial office who will then investigate and possibly get a third reviewer. The editor in chief or area editor can see the reviewer replies, just not the names of the reviewers and authors.

4. Your point about stealing research is not an issue. The publication is not anonymous; theft will be discovered very quickly by the scientific community (which will discover it more likely than two reviewers anyway). However, I'm pretty sure many top journals also use anti-plagiarism software.

I really don't see how double blind review could be abused more than non-blind review.

Stealing research is not a problem specific to double-blinded reviewing, but it is a problem.

Two examples from last year: * https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... * https://www.universitetsavisa.no/etikk-forskningsetikk-forsk...

If you are worried about "stealing research" , you have no right to public grant funding.

>Truly double blind peer review would likely encourage this. Maybe it would also further encourage people to steal research or peer review outside of their expertise.

How so?

For smaller papers, if the papers still stand up to review even when the research has been cut up, that seems a neutral effect at worse. It might even be seen as a benefit as each paper is more focused.

As for stealing results, the names will still be attached before the printing is done. Only the review process will be double blind. Thus any ability to detect stolen research will still occur.

You can easily find the authors based on the references they use and the topic.

Sure but the idea is that you don't try to find out who the author is, and if you recognize the author anyway, you decline the review. I review regularly and that's what I do whenever I recognize an author.

Don't you recognise authors on topics you're most competent to review on?

Not very often in a way that causes me to decline to review. What happens sometimes is that you have a suspicion but it's not definite. It could be one out of a dozen authors, or a newcomer you've never heard of. I'm in the humanities, however, things probably look different in the natural sciences.

Not everyone seems to have your ethics.

As the linked article points out, practices can vary widely across fields (and in fields where preprints are available, maintaining authour anonymity in a double-blind setting furthermore relies on revieweres not having come across a preprint of the paper that is being reviewed which in turn can easily happen in smaller research-communities).

Mathematics doesn't have double blind peer review unfortunately. It will help in a big number of cases, even if some cases fall off (for example, if you do experiments on a well-known software which only one lab works on, then double blind will have a limited impact.)

What is your discipline? I'm in physics and double blind peer review is not the norm.

Well in various CS fields people preprint on arXiv these days, so it is easy for reviewers to unblind themselves. Sometimes accidentally, because preprint timing and subsequent Twitter advertising coincide so well with conference deadlines...

Why doesn't arxiv allow name-blind preprint posting?

That would be a good idea, and then have the names revealed in a future version like the way the paper itself can be updated. I don't think it is possible though. If it is, it certainly isn't used.

Without peer review, publications without names would be untrusted and untrustworthy, and would probably represent a security issue

The main point of arXiv is not to substitute for actual publication. Some people use it that way, which could still occur. But most intend to submit their work for review to a venue with a supposed double blind process. The use of arXiv is for flag planting and ease of open access.

Often the arXiv upload will be right around the time of a conference deadline in fact. For these people I see no problem with an OpenReview-esque setup where the arXiv page remains anonymous until the authors opt to reveal themselves.

If people don't care for true double blind review then they should stop pretending they do. Conferences like ICLR and NeurIPS are far from blind. It would be one thing if it were just a matter of trusting reviewers to not Google the paper title, but it goes beyond that. There are currently no restrictions on the use of social media to advertise works under review nor on the timing of arXiv uploads, which can trigger alerts to those in the field right around review time.

Even with blind reviews, many people cite their prior work extensively, so it can be hard to truly obscure who the paper authors are.

Heard from colleagues working in academia that their profs were absolutely strict about the layout, the way graphs look, the colors which needed to be used, etc. All so reviewers could decode who's actually behind a paper.

Not every conference or journal is blinded, no.

"double blind" is not close to achieved, given differences in writing style, paper structure, graphics, choice of citations, and and and...

I suspect the mechanism goes something like this:

Reviewers prioritize their time above all, and after that correctness，leaving novelty in last place. If a paper comes from a unknown lab it tends to get greater scrutiny because a famous name is a subconscious stand-in for correctness. You spend less time reviewing famous authors because you think they are less likely to have bugs.

I think "aligned with reviewer's biases" is more important than correctness or novelty.

Reviewing a paper is effectively unrewarded: you need some kind of reviewing service on your CV, but the amount and quality is barely measured, let alone considered for career progression.

Reviewing a very good paper is quick and easy ("LGTM"). Really terrible papers are not too bad if they're obviously awful, but reviewing something subtly flawed takes a lot of work: you need to identify the flaws and describe them in a way that's compelling enough to convince the authors--or at least the editors. Ideally, you'll also explain how to address them, which is more work now and down the road when you review the authors' often-grudging implementation of your suggestion.

In such a world, people may be increasingly reluctant to review papers without some indication of their quality (for which name is a rough proxy). My solution to this is to somehow make reviewing more valued. It's an important part of science and deserves more than a checkbox.

I think this is the best point here.

Reviewing is hard work with very few rewards - and you have to decide at the start whether it is worth your time to embark on it. Ideally we would like to learn something from the paper.

I and most people here would most likely strongly prefer to review a paper written by someone good at what they do.

In reality most papers are pretty bad - thus when we prefer reviewing papers written by Nobel prize winners we are not "biased" and "humbly bowing" before their greatness - we are just trying to make it worth our while.