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

[Alon Lischinsky]

On 2011/10/2 Robert Zimbardo <robertzimbardo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Robert has succintly stated the usual arguments for double blinds: (a)
the reviewer cannot be biased by prior assumptions about the author;
(b) the author cannot be biased by prior assumptions about the
reviewer; (c) the author cannot retaliate.

I believe there is substance to all of them. On the other hand, I
share other list members' doubts about (a); it may be that I work on a
rather small field (there aren't so many researchers working on corpus
methods for analysing environmental discourse, compared to, say,
gender or academic writing), but the authors of three out of the last
four papers I've been asked to review were immediately apparent from
their writing style and methodological preferences. I could have
recused myself, obviously, but I did not feel knowing who the authors
were impaired my ability to review; actually, it provided me with a
better body of evidence to assess whether the paper was making an
original contribution rather than rehashing old themes, and to suggest
avenues for improvement. I would rather give authors a choice of open
or blind review (and ask reviewers who are confident about the
identity of the author of a blindly-submitted paper to recuse
themselves) rather than pretend to enforce it unilaterally.

> Plus, could there be a reason they do that in most other disciplines?

Different disciplines work and evolve differently, and I wouldn't
blindly go for the "everybody else is doing it, so why can't we?"
attitude. The scale and structure of professional networks is probably
very important, as well as the degree of compartimentalisation of
programmes and issues. Probably the best strategy for stimulating the
sociological or methodological imagination is not the same as for
selecting solutions for well-defined problems.

Just my $0.02,

A.

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