Reviewers are likely to have a hard time shooting down the work of anyone they know personally, and in specialized sciences, the probability that a paper was written by a friend or former colleague of the reviewer is high enough to be a problem. On the other hand, credibility does matter; if an unestablished author observes something strange, it’s likely that he’s made a mistake, but an old hand making the same observation should not be ignored. Perhaps instead of a name, reviewers should be given an abstract indication of the author’s credibility, such as the author’s faculty title, or the number of times they’ve published before.
Reviewers are likely to have a hard time shooting down the work of anyone they know personally, and in specialized sciences, the probability that a paper was written by a friend or former colleague of the reviewer is high enough to be a problem.
On the other hand, people have different, and often recognizable writing styles. If you’re in a specialized science with a small enough circle, then you may be able to recognize a paper written by your friend (or your foe!) even though it was anonymized.
Or maybe you may even know that your friend (or foe?) is working on a paper on a specific topic just from reading their blog/Facebook/Twitter/etc.
Reviewers are likely to have a hard time shooting down the work of anyone they know personally, and in specialized sciences, the probability that a paper was written by a friend or former colleague of the reviewer is high enough to be a problem. On the other hand, credibility does matter; if an unestablished author observes something strange, it’s likely that he’s made a mistake, but an old hand making the same observation should not be ignored. Perhaps instead of a name, reviewers should be given an abstract indication of the author’s credibility, such as the author’s faculty title, or the number of times they’ve published before.
On the other hand, people have different, and often recognizable writing styles. If you’re in a specialized science with a small enough circle, then you may be able to recognize a paper written by your friend (or your foe!) even though it was anonymized.
Or maybe you may even know that your friend (or foe?) is working on a paper on a specific topic just from reading their blog/Facebook/Twitter/etc.
I’d be interested in how exactly something like that would work, let’s be careful not to make the object of science publishing papers.