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One of the journals in my field requires you to strip out all identifiers before submission. This is remarkably difficult. Consider the things that might give y
by Fomite 11y ago
One of the journals in my field requires you to strip out all identifiers before submission. This is remarkably difficult. Consider the things that might give you away:
- GitHub, FigShare, institutional repositories etc. for code and data
- Information on the location of the study
- Statistical packages used (hope you didn't author the one you're using)
Of course, anonymity will be shattered the moment anyone talks about their work at a conference. Furthermore, several systematic reviews and meta-analysis studies I've worked on benefitted greatly from being able to email the authors directly with questions.
I'd also be concerned that people will mentally assign things to a "Big Name" in the field anyway. "Ah, another paper on HAART. Must be out of so-and-so's lab..."
- tibbon 11y agoSure- you can absolutely figure out who wrote the paper given enough work. Yet, I really do like the idea of first the paper being reviewed on it's own merit/ideas/findings, and then potentially people seeing who was involved as a secondary thing at some later point after judgements had already been made.
- Fomite 11y agoI really like double-blind peer review. This was more a note that, when the paper is accepted, those identifying things go back in. The proposal to have papers be anonymous would have to leave them back out, stripping the paper of important context, and making open science a bigger pain than it already is. Which is kinda contrary to the goal.
- scott_s 11y agoI have submitted several papers for double-blind peer review. (I work in the systems side of computer science.) My rule is that I will not weaken a paper through the double-blind process - that is, even if saying this paper builds on prior work may give enough information to out me or my co-authors, I still do it. I still say what system we used, and say it builds on previous work, but I pretend that that work was done by someone else. In practice, someone who really wants to break the double-blind veil probably can. But I don't think that's a problem, as very few people are consciously biased, and will actively seek out such identifying information. By removing names and affiliations, and pretending all of our work was done by someone else, I think that's enough to help people avoid unconscious bias.
- greggarious 11y agoOr if you're expanding on a previous study. "(AUTHOR et al.) performed a small scale lab study. (ANONYMOUS SUBMISSION) performed that exact same study, on hundreds of people, and expand on the work of authors..."
- Wingman4l7 11y agoWell, there's "stripping out identifiers" and then there's "FBI-proof OPSEC" -- no one is going to run your word corpus through stylometric analysis, removing obvious links should be enough. Makes me wonder if you could implement the exporting of a "review" version in LaTeX, similar to a debug mode -- set a flag, and any content with an {ID} wrapper around it gets left out or is substituted for something anonymous.
- Fomite 11y agoI don't think it's "FBI-proof OPSEC" to note that there are many things in a journal article that will give away the identity of the author. While you can say "Remove obvious links", to many experts $Topic in $Location is enough to allow a pretty good guess of whose lab its out of. Or the name of a long running study. And I'm not going to maintain a whole separate Github account to anonymize code distribution.