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At the root of this proposal is the fantasy that scientists would somehow be selfless adherents to the alter of the scientific method. They give up all honor, p

At the root of this proposal is the fantasy that scientists would somehow be selfless adherents to the alter of the scientific method. They give up all honor, pride and recognition so that the "scientific method" be protected from the often selfish desires of human beings. In the real world, having names on papers is a really good thing. In real academia, I've heard professors say "well that work was done by so-and-so, and they're bad researchers so I don't trust their results". There's this popular misconception that just because something is published in a peer-reviewed journal that it must be true. Nobody in research actually believes that. All it means is the authors were able to convince the reviewers and the peer reviewers to publish it.

api 11y ago
What if papers were cryptographically signed so that they can be claimed later and there were a period of, say, one year of anonymity after publication? This period would allow things like peer review and initial recognition of the paper to occur with less social bias. Just as important would be institutional anonymity. A paper from Nowheresville should be considered equally to a paper from Harvard. Finally I think papers should be required in their headings to disclose sources of funding for the work therein, although this would have to be done later so as not to indirectly compromise the anonymity period.
- rubidium 11y ago
  What problem are you trying solve? As bad as problems as the academic community has (it has lots!!), names on papers is not one of them. Science is the organic collection of all people and resources and knowledge engaged in figuring out how our world works. Having blind papers would mean I would just have to spend an extra 10 minutes reading each paper to figure out what group wrote it. The fact that Prof. Ivy League gets her results recognized more easily then Prof. Nowhereville is, actually, an ok system. Because Prof. Ivy is more likely to be pursuing interesting problems to the rest of the scientific community, she's more likely to be trusted by other scientists to be a good scientist (i.e. not careless), and the system supports people who have "made it" through the academic gauntlet. If Prof. Nowhereville actually finds something interesting, pursues publication, passes peer review, and it gets published then great. His results are probably worth the attention of the scientific community. But the fact that the barriers are higher is ok, because he hasn't proven himself to be as trustworthy.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    > What problem are you trying solve? I think this is ultimately a manifestation of "scientific deontology ethics", a fantasy that we should approach each paper with identical, non-prejudicial priors and evaluate it on its own merits. (It is the scientific analog to the reductio ad absurdum of maximum non-prejudice in human affairs, where one never considers any background about a person before dealing with them.) This position only seem tenable to those who haven't yet had to wade through the morass of terrible and misleading result in the literature. In other words, this sort of idea is not a consequentialist attempt to solve a problem, it's a deotological attempt to stop unfairness.
    - jeffbr13 11y ago
      Every new scientist having to learn the heuristics to judge a high-quality paper from its metadata seems like a local maxima in fighting spam, and something that makes the profession harder to get into. The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions, which seems like a better way to filter poor-quality human-written content (we're not talking about email spam here). Plus, by making the process explicit and visible, it'd be easier for an outsider to engage with new scientific literature too. Perhaps that's an approach we could use in software development. It's mostly how I use HN or Reddit -- I read plenty of comments, and only ever look at the name if the comment provokes interest in the writer's background.
      - jessriedel 11y ago
        > The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions I think you've got it backwards. First make the good tools, then stop using the bad ones. You don't force people to develop good Bayesian spam filters by banning whitelists. Rather, the Bayesian spam filters get invented, then people are happy to stop using whitelists. Likewise, scientists would love nothing more than to have the tools that enable a transparent frictionless utopia free to barriers to entry. They'd get access to a few new ideas caught in the spam filter! But we don't get there by anonymizing papers. That would just lead (almost instantly!) to good scientists whispering in the ears of their colleagues about which papers they just published, or to take a look at that new paper by so-and-so, etc. (And then the only people who could access the metadata would be those who are already at good institutions!)
- irremediable 11y ago
  I don't think anonymity is achievable if the paper's to be any good. Papers build on previous work, and are reviewed by people working in a relevant field. In most fields, most of the time, you have a good idea who wrote a given paper based on what they're doing, whom they cite, and what software/methods they use.
ThomPete 11y ago
This is not a one sided discussion. Both have pros and cons. One con with having names on a paper is that it can give it attention purely because of the authors name at the expense of something else. However I agree that scientist wouldn't do it (which kind of supports the idea of nameless papers IMO)
- paulgayham 11y ago
  It also hides when people are funded by X industry or Y interest group. Anonymous papers will be a pile of garbage.
otakucode 11y ago
That's a good thing? It's exactly how we ended up with leaded gasoline.

api 11y ago

What if papers were cryptographically signed so that they can be claimed later and there were a period of, say, one year of anonymity after publication? This period would allow things like peer review and initial recognition of the paper to occur with less social bias. Just as important would be institutional anonymity. A paper from Nowheresville should be considered equally to a paper from Harvard. Finally I think papers should be required in their headings to disclose sources of funding for the work therein, although this would have to be done later so as not to indirectly compromise the anonymity period.

rubidium 11y ago
What problem are you trying solve? As bad as problems as the academic community has (it has lots!!), names on papers is not one of them. Science is the organic collection of all people and resources and knowledge engaged in figuring out how our world works. Having blind papers would mean I would just have to spend an extra 10 minutes reading each paper to figure out what group wrote it. The fact that Prof. Ivy League gets her results recognized more easily then Prof. Nowhereville is, actually, an ok system. Because Prof. Ivy is more likely to be pursuing interesting problems to the rest of the scientific community, she's more likely to be trusted by other scientists to be a good scientist (i.e. not careless), and the system supports people who have "made it" through the academic gauntlet. If Prof. Nowhereville actually finds something interesting, pursues publication, passes peer review, and it gets published then great. His results are probably worth the attention of the scientific community. But the fact that the barriers are higher is ok, because he hasn't proven himself to be as trustworthy.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  > What problem are you trying solve? I think this is ultimately a manifestation of "scientific deontology ethics", a fantasy that we should approach each paper with identical, non-prejudicial priors and evaluate it on its own merits. (It is the scientific analog to the reductio ad absurdum of maximum non-prejudice in human affairs, where one never considers any background about a person before dealing with them.) This position only seem tenable to those who haven't yet had to wade through the morass of terrible and misleading result in the literature. In other words, this sort of idea is not a consequentialist attempt to solve a problem, it's a deotological attempt to stop unfairness.
  - jeffbr13 11y ago
    Every new scientist having to learn the heuristics to judge a high-quality paper from its metadata seems like a local maxima in fighting spam, and something that makes the profession harder to get into. The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions, which seems like a better way to filter poor-quality human-written content (we're not talking about email spam here). Plus, by making the process explicit and visible, it'd be easier for an outsider to engage with new scientific literature too. Perhaps that's an approach we could use in software development. It's mostly how I use HN or Reddit -- I read plenty of comments, and only ever look at the name if the comment provokes interest in the writer's background.
    - jessriedel 11y ago
      > The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions I think you've got it backwards. First make the good tools, then stop using the bad ones. You don't force people to develop good Bayesian spam filters by banning whitelists. Rather, the Bayesian spam filters get invented, then people are happy to stop using whitelists. Likewise, scientists would love nothing more than to have the tools that enable a transparent frictionless utopia free to barriers to entry. They'd get access to a few new ideas caught in the spam filter! But we don't get there by anonymizing papers. That would just lead (almost instantly!) to good scientists whispering in the ears of their colleagues about which papers they just published, or to take a look at that new paper by so-and-so, etc. (And then the only people who could access the metadata would be those who are already at good institutions!)
irremediable 11y ago
I don't think anonymity is achievable if the paper's to be any good. Papers build on previous work, and are reviewed by people working in a relevant field. In most fields, most of the time, you have a good idea who wrote a given paper based on what they're doing, whom they cite, and what software/methods they use.

ThomPete 11y ago

This is not a one sided discussion. Both have pros and cons. One con with having names on a paper is that it can give it attention purely because of the authors name at the expense of something else. However I agree that scientist wouldn't do it (which kind of supports the idea of nameless papers IMO)

paulgayham 11y ago
It also hides when people are funded by X industry or Y interest group. Anonymous papers will be a pile of garbage.

otakucode 11y ago

That's a good thing? It's exactly how we ended up with leaded gasoline.