> You want your work to stand by itself. Otherwise you're blasting open a very corrupt door where appeals to authority, petty politics, careerism, and funding p

> You want your work to stand by itself. Otherwise you're blasting open a very corrupt door where appeals to authority, petty politics, careerism, and funding play a role in how a paper is approved. This door is already open, and impossible to close [1]. For any reviewer closely familiar with the area the paper is in it is trivial to guess which group the paper came out of 9 times out of 10. Style, approach, citations, and just knowing what the other people in your area are working on all contribute. To achieve any sort of blindness you have to go to reviewers who don't know that area as well... which, I suppose, does decrease the potential for corruption--at the cost of the reviewers not understanding the paper as well. > Isn't the whole point of a paper to present a topic in a clear and understandable way, so that your peers are able to cut through the bullshit? Even a well written paper often requires some effort to understand, due to conceptual novelties, mathematical complexities, etc. Unfortunately there's little incentive for reviewers to put in much mental effort. Some of them will. Many won't. > When you pick a journal you pick the subset of your peers to review your work. If your peers point out problems then why not listen to them? Because the "problems" are often bullshit. You're assuming the reviewers are acting in good faith and finding legitimate problems with the paper, but they're often not--usually not out of malice, just laziness. There's no incentive to put any effort into a review above the minimum to convince the editor that your review is plausible. This doesn't take much since the editor is probably only going to glance briefly at the reviews. If you can finish your review in an hour instead of a day you can spend the rest of the day writing your own papers or doing other work that actually furthers your career. [1] In all but the largest, most active areas, where there are so many people working that nobody can keep up.