Thursday 7 April 2016

anonymity - Is there any evidence that double blind peer review systems are beneficial?


Every so often, I stumble upon a question concerning "double blind peer review", i.e., the authors don't know the reviewers (as usual) but also the reviewers don't know the identity of the authors.


It's always struck me as a rather odd system, with no discernible benefits (because I am under the impression that it's often rather easy to determine who the authors of a paper are anyway), and the creation of dozens of problems with people always being worried of somehow "breaking" the double blindness. (It is not helped by the fact that this would be impossible to implement in my field, math, where everyone posts their preprints on arXiv and people don't hesitate to give talks about unpublished papers).


Is there any actual, scientific, serious research into evaluating the benefits of this system? Or is it all just inertia/tradition/good intentions? I'm not talking about armchair justifications for it with no data to support it.




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