[Corpora-List] Corpora Digest, Vol 52, Issue 3 [was blind reviewing]

[Alon Lischinsky]

On 2011/10/3 Robert Zimbardo <robertzimbardo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thing is, it is
> certain that double-blind reviewing hurts no one other than those who
> feel aesthetically displeased by writing in a an undignified way, and
> it is likely to protect people.

I think you are ignoring the argument, quite forcefully put by others,
that people (i.e., reviewers) will often spend less effort and be more
often uncivil and unhelpful when there identity is unknown. And this
is not specifically a peer review issue, but rather a
well-acknowledged fact about human interaction. That is to say, there
is an implicit bias to 'blind' practices, and it's not easy to decide
whether it is preferable to the biases it's supposed to protect us
from.

> As to disciplines evolve
> differently, yes, but there *are* things that should be pretty
> universal and there is no good reason not to review double-blindly
> just as there is no good reason to not review, to not do objective
> research, to not aim for replicable research, to not quote previous
> studies

You missed the substance of my remark. Some practices are intended to
foster normal science (e.g., replication). Others are intended to
foster methodological and theoretical creativity. Only rarely the same
instrument will serve both ends. The question is, whether the net
gains of peer reviewing in terms of one set of practices will not be
countered by a net loss in terms of the other.

> All those things are meta-virtues that should be in no need
> of defence anymore, especially since many of us are still struggling
> with shrugging of 50 years of methodological stone age of generative
> grammar.

Most of the widely-quoted generativist works were peer-reviewed, and
I'd bet not a few of them were blindly reviewed. Not that it did a
great deal of good for the discipline.

A.

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