How Blind is Double Blind Review?

Double-blind peer review.

Since Nature Nanotechnology launched in October 2006, our approach to peer review has been the same. We, like most science journals, use ‘single-blind’ peer review: that is, the referees of a paper know who the authors are but the authors don’t know who the referees are. We are now making a change to this process and will offer ‘doubleblind’ peer review — in which referees review a paper withou...

Why Double-Blind Review Is Preferable for Scholarly Journals

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. pISSN 1011-8934 eISSN 1598-6357 http://dx.doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2014.29.10.1438 • J Korean Me...

Moving to the Double-Blind Review System

Effectiveness of Anonymization in Double-Blind Review

Double-blind review relies on the authors’ ability and willingness to effectively anonymize their submissions. We explore anonymization effectiveness at ASE 2016, OOPSLA 2016, and PLDI 2016 by asking reviewers if they can guess author identities. We find that 74%–90% of reviews contain no correct guess and that reviewers who self-identify as experts on a paper’s topic are more likely to attempt...

Double-blind review in software engineering venues

The peer review process is central to the scientific method, the advancement and spread of research, as well as crucial for individual careers. However, the single-blind review mode currently used in most Software Engineering (SE) venues is susceptible to apparent and hidden biases, since reviewers know the identity of authors. We perform a study on the benefits and costs that are associated wi...