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

[Laurence Anthony]

This discussion seems to be fragmenting somewhat and I'm starting to
lose sight of its purpose. However, I would like to respond to the
comments made by Alon:

> 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.

As I wrote earlier, in almost all cases, the reviewers' identities are
not unknown (at least to the editor/chair). Editors/chairs make a
direct request to reviewers (whose identity they certainly do know!)
to review a paper, and in my experience, the reviewers return their
reviews to the editor/chair *not* the author. (The editors/chairs then
act on these reviews in whatever way they feel most appropriate). In
such a situation, I would be surprised to hear that reviewers "*often*
spend less effort on their reviews and be *more often* uncivil and
unhelpful" (my emphasis), as it would reflect extremely badly on the
reviewer (in the eyes of the editor/chair), especially considering
that editors/chairs are usually 'big names' themselves.

Of course, I have no statistics on the quality of reviews so I cannot
comment on the accuracy of the word "often" above. Perhaps an editor
of a journal/conference would like to comment.

> 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 you say,  "it's not easy to decide whether [a blind practice] is
preferable".  However, in these cases, don't we normally look to the
lessons we get from history? Throughout history, society has
implemented various methods to avoid biases in decision making
systems, and 'blind' practices seem to be much more prevalent now. The
most obvious example is, of course, the election system of every
modern, democratic society. Earlier, somebody arguing for 'open
systems' referred to reviews as being similar to court cases. Even
here, though, the *individual* jury members certainly do *not* state
publicly what their decision was. They form a collective opinion which
is then read out by the head juror or foreman. To me, there seems an
obvious similarity between jury members/head juror and
reviewers/editor. In fact, in election systems too, we have people
acting in similar roles, i.e, voters and the returning officer (person
in charge).

I would be very interested to hear of an open-system of elections or
court judgments, or journal reviews that had proven to be less biased
and more protective of the defendant/campaigner/author than what we
already have.

Laurence.

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