CCL: Name of authors during review ...!!!

[Sebastian Kozuch <seb.kozuch[a]gmail.com>]

In spite of the fact that I enjoy these "soap opera" debates, since this topic is out of the CCL objective I didn't want to comment.
However, I succumbed to the temptation.
I wanted to say that Igor is completely right. Yes, a lot of times it is possible to recognize the reviewers, and in a double blind system it will be easy to recognize the "principal investigator" (especially when sentences like "in our previous work..." appear in the manuscript). However, that works only for established, well known researchers (even in narrow fields such as in computational chemistry). And since journal editors are (usually) those established researchers, then it is clear why they find the double blind system "laughable". But for rookies (like me), that is not really funny.
Here are my reasons on why I like the double blind system:

1) I don't want to be frightened by big names. If I have to review a paper of a Nobel laureate, I will be completely inhibited to make corrections just by reading his/her name. That's not fair.
2) If the paper comes from some unpronounceable unknown authors from a third word country, I don't want my prejudice to affect my judgement (and let's not deceive ourselves, we do prejudge). That's even more unfair than point 1. For the same reason, I don't want to know the institutions or the countries from where the paper was submitted.
3) If I am the author of a paper I want the same chance of that paper to be published in a high level journal no matter if I am accompanied or not by a top ranking researcher. We only care about the scientific merits of the paper and not about the authors, right?
4) Even if we can easily recognize the authors, the principle still stands. We won't be completely sure of the full list of authors. Plus, there is the philosophical science stand that we should only care about facts and not about authorities. Yes, it may be sometimes "laughable", but even in those cases it is formally right.

Let's not fall into the ugly Matthew effect:
"For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them." (Matthew 25:29)

Best,
Sebastian



On 5/5/2014 10:11 AM, Igor Filippov igor.v.filippov|,|gmail.com wrote:

>Sent to CCL by: Andreas Klamt [klamt :Âcosmologic.de]
>Trying to anonymize the submitted articles is hopeless: Being experts in
>the field many reviewers will immediately know who wrote the submitted
>manuscript. This leads nowhere.

This seems to pre-suppose that all interesting research is done only by well-established scientists.

I guess work done by a (relatively) younger and not well known person will just fly under the radar.

I've certainly seen very interesting work submitted by people whose names did not ring any bells for me,

and I would certainly hope that if I publish something Âoutside of my usual field it will be

reviewed based on its merits and not based on the fact whether or not it has Âa well-known professor

in the author list.

Best regards,

Igor