Science: choosing anonymous peer review does not increase the probability of publication

Publishing articles is very important for scientific research colleagues, because in the scientific community, the value evaluation of personal achievements depends on the wide recognition of scientific research work, and the most effective way is to publish papers It's no wonder that publishing articles in magazines with a large number of readers and high impact factors has become a huge pressure This problem is even more serious in research institutions and countries where the number of papers published by researchers and the impact factors of research journals are the promotion requirements Especially once the paper is submitted to the journal, the reviewer knows who the author is and the author often doesn't know who the other is, which is a common feeling of uneasiness As a result, many researchers prefer anonymity because they think it will make their papers more fair However, a new study conducted by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) shows that only about one eighth of the authors, if any, are really willing to be blinded by the reviewers The study, which was recently presented at the 8th international peer review conference, also found that there was a very low probability of receiving papers that had been double-blind reviewed At present, most papers are reviewed in the form of single blind In other words, the reviewer knows who the author of the paper is, but the reverse is not true In theory, knowing the author's name can make reviewers biased intentionally or unintentionally against researchers from specific countries, ethnic minorities or women, and more friendly to researchers who are already well-known in this field A 2007 study in the journal behavioral ecology found that when anonymous peer review (also known as double-blind review) was used, the journal published more papers by female authors Whether the double blind review method can provide a fair opportunity for some unknown authors to get the same review as the well-known authors has been controversial In 2013, a survey of more than 4000 researchers showed that three-quarters of respondents believed that double-blind assessment was the "most effective method" In contrast, the double-blind review experiments conducted by the Journal of the American physical association in the past 20 years did not show satisfactory results From 1993 to 2001, only 0.06% of submitted articles were required to use double-blind review, and only about 6% of these articles were finally accepted by the publishers This acceptance rate is 90% lower than that of articles without double-blind review Under the double-blind concept, journals provide a list of how authors can anonymize contributions, such as avoiding words such as "we found before" and removing certain types of meta information from documents But researchers say it's almost impossible to be completely anonymous Because most of the research work is based on the previous work of the same author, it does not need a strong detective mind to guess the identity of the author Another objection is that with all identification marks removed, reviewers cannot properly judge the feasibility and importance of research results based on previous research work of the same laboratory or research team At a recent peer review conference, ELISA de Ranieri from Nature Publishing Group presented data on 106373 papers submitted to 25 journals of the group from March 2015 to February 2017 In only 12% of the cases, the authors chose double-blind review In nature, 14% of papers are selected for double-blind review, 12% for "sister journals" and 9% for open access journals The data suggest that concerns about possible discrimination may be a big factor About 32% of Indian authors and 22% of Chinese authors chose double-blind evaluation, while only 7% and 8% of American and French authors chose this method There is no difference between female and male authors in this regard The peer review monument to the unsung heroes of Science (source: Gizmodo) some scholars believe that the main reason for this is that it is difficult for outstanding experts to review the manuscript At present, the number of articles has increased dramatically, and comprehensive and constructive review opinions have shown unprecedented importance The lack of excellent reviewers is an important obstacle to eliminate the doubts of contributors and maintain the quality of publications For various reasons, the energy of scientists is also greatly consumed in addition to the time of scientific research, so it is difficult to draw out the time and energy for manuscript review Moreover, there is a lack of sufficient reward or incentive mechanism for researchers who undertake this important work Therefore, the evaluation and judgment process of the reviewers will be more simplified Second, some journals don't want contributors to know who they trust or who their best reviewers are Only a few magazines, such as those published by the American economic society, explicitly list their reviewers to thank them, but most of them do not Richard n Zare, an academician of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, once suggested that the average number of reviews per reviewer per year could be published in some way, such as one, two or many Or it also advocates to provide the reviewers with the right to disclose their identity, not only to decrypt the author, but also to sign their names as reviewers in the published articles Although anonymous peer review is controversial, and the data shows that this review method has not significantly changed the status quo, and the authors who choose anonymous peer review are far lower than the expectation of journal editors, but the author's feedback is quite positive: Turning anonymous peer review into "standard" As a result, Nature Publishing Group decided to extend this selection mechanism to all its journals.