Blind Review
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Thursday, December 07, 2006 at 4:48 PM
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1 Comments |
There's an interesting discussion about online drafts and their influence on blindness over at Certain Doubts.
Several commentators have noted that it's not so much online drafts but expertise that undermine blindness in the review process. And it doesn't even take all that robust an expertise. I know that in many subfields within free will, I can make a good guess about who wrote any given paper. Both style and substance contribute to this. At the very least, there are groups of authors who tend to cite each other and write in certain ways (even putting substantive issues aside). Take the Florida State crowd; they seem to have a distinct way of thinking and writing about free will. My guess is that no one who knows the literature at all could mistake a paper from one of these philosophers with a paper by someone stationed at at Notre Dame or Riverside, say. In as small a community as free will, no competent reviewer would be without a good guess as to who authored a given paper.
Blind review is an admirable institution. And our best philosophers have always worked within it (David Lewis published almost exclusively in blind reviewed journals, for example). There are certain factors that limit the effectiveness of blind review, however. And these factors are here to stay.
1 Comments:
Noumena at 5:09 PM said... Blind review is supposed to level the intellectual playing field in two ways: big names can't toss off a poorly-argued paper and get it published just on reputation alone, and small names won't have their papers turned down just because of a lack of reputation alone. If what you say is true (and I have no doubt that it is), then the first sort of leveling is less likely to happen, because people will recognise papers authored by big names based on their writing style, and be more likely to approve them even with significant shortcomings. But this is balanced somewhat because it makes the second sort more likely: a small name who can imitate the style of the big name is more likely to be published.
So I suppose we should all learn to write exactly like our advisors?
