[Corpora-List] Corpora Digest, Vol 52, Issue 3

[Khurshid Ahmad]

Dear Yorick
Things are becoming really serious here: Grad students suggesting that the
rejection of a leading prof's paper will ruin his/her career? Are we not
teaching our grad students that critical inquiry should be conducted
without fear or favour?

The pressure to be metricated by 'publications' is such that academics
plan their research publications around major 'conferences'.  Is this
beacuse conference reviewers are more lenient than journal reviewers and
that conferences have a shorter turn-around time? I think reviewer
anonymity, often abused and laborious, might just help the grad student to
yell that the king-professor has no clothes! And in some cases the
king-professor might just look at the review.

Best wishes



> There may be a cultural difference here between countries and continents:
> in an ideal world a senior person getting a very penetrating and critical
> review from a (known) grad student or junior faculty member would probably
> seek to hire them--in terms of Popperian principles. Whether or not I am
> right about the world spread of ideal behavior---- and I think i know
> pretty well how it distributes, as  do we all--nothing whatever can be
> done about it. Which, alas, make uniform reviewing practice for
> international conferences very hard--as we know, and this is there we came
> in to the movie......
> Yorick Wilks
>
>
>
> On 2 Oct 2011, at 19:06, Robert Zimbardo wrote:
>
>> The moment reviewer names would not be anonymous anymore, I would stop
>> to review. As a young scholar, who could afford to non-anonymously
>> reject a paper/abstract by [insert big name here] without fearing that
>> that will backfire when application/postdoc renewal times are
>> approaching? At any career level, who could afford to non-anonymously
>> review a paper or book (proposal) by [insert big name here] negatively
>> without fearing a negative backlash when tenure/promotion letters are
>> up? Who can afford to maybe have annoyed someone who will be on an ESF
>> panel and 'retaliate'? And all of this is independent of whether the
>> reviewer is right or not, humans all too often retaliate even if they
>> are treated 'correctly'. What other reason would there be that pretty
>> much all reviews on LinguistList these days are by younger scholars
>> (who want to get the books cheap) and of course positive?
>>
>> AS> It seems you have not carefully read this thread and are just
>> reacting in anger.
>> A truly scientific and pertinent statement that you had better made
>> anonymously ...
>>
>> It surprises me how anyone can not see that double-blind reviewing is
>> the only way to go unless one wants to run the risk of breeding
>> in-groups and issuing gagging orders: it protects younger/less-known
>> scholars from being categorised by 'virtue' of 'not being well-known',
>> 'not being from the right country', and it protects reviewers from
>> retaliation. Plus, I wonder how much the mere allegation by Yorick
>> that it is so easy to recognise authors is just not a cognitive bias;
>> making such an assertion does certainly not make that a fact (I
>> usually just make the opposite experience) and Graeme made that point
>> better than I could have. Even if some authors or reviewers were
>> recognisable from their submission or review, those who are not are
>> still protected and the 'undignifying' writing by not quoting oneself
>> that much, cmon please ... Are people here seriously saying that
>> paraphrasing two sentences and changing their precious name into
>> [anonymized] is too much to protect especially younger scholars from
>> bias and retaliation? Please tell me we are not that self-absorbed and
>> self-confident in our we-would-never-do-that stance. Plus, could there
>> be a reason they do that in most other disciplines?
>>
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>
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Khurshid Ahmad

Professor of Computer Science
Department of Computer Science
Trinity College,
DUBLIN-2
IRELAND
Phone 00 353 1 896 8429

Web Page: http://people.tcd.ie/kahmad


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