[9692] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Fairness of Peer Review (was Some Thoughts on the NSB)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Partridge)
Sun Jan 16 19:45:48 1994
To: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (Sean McLinden)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
From: Craig Partridge <craig@aland.bbn.com>
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 94 16:40:52 -0800
Hi Sean:
While I agree with some of your concerns about peer review, I wanted
to comment on one:
> In the second, peer reviewed research, just like peer reviewed
> literature, is not blinded (it would be difficult, but not impossible to
> do this), therefore, personalities may be involved which have little or
> nothing to do with the merit of the work and everything to do with
> feelings toward the author or researcher.
You're right that it is not impossible to do blinded reviewing (usually
called double-blind -- neither reviewers nor authors are identified). In
fact it is done routinely in some subfields of computer science and other
fields. The basic methods for achieving blind reviewing are reasonably well
understood. As I understand it, the major risk is reviewers trying to guess
who the proposal is from -- apparently after they discover they've guessed
wrong a few times, they stop. (I've been trying to learn a bit about experience
with various systems since we're doing double-blind reviewing for ACM SIGCOMM
this year for the first time).
Craig
