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At least in computer science, most of the major conferences are double-blind reviewed. This means that it's more difficult to figure out whose paper one is revi

by apu 18y ago

At least in computer science, most of the major conferences are double-blind reviewed. This means that it's more difficult to figure out whose paper one is reviewing. This helps curb some of the abuses you seem to be worried about. Another thing to keep in mind is that academic papers are supposed to be about the truth, and so there is ostensibly an "objective" standard to which papers are held. Of course this varies a lot by quality of the conference, but the best conferences will generally do a fairly good job of letting the best papers in and keeping the bad papers out (most of the confusion/"unfairness" comes at the borderline papers, where it is understandably more difficult to make a judgement). That being said, I think some types of competition will always be a problem in any discipline, although it's not at all clear that the corporate world is at all better.

amichail 18y ago
Self-employment is much better in that respect. And BTW, it is exactly the desire for objective evaluation that has penalized interesting ideas (e.g., for web 2.0 apps) that are hard to evaluate using experiments/proofs. That's rather unfortunate.
cperciva 18y ago
At least in computer science, most of the major conferences are double-blind reviewed. This means that it's more difficult to figure out whose paper one is reviewing. Theoretically, yes. In practice, anonymizing work is hard to do -- if you're prominent enough in a field to be asked to review papers, you probably have a good idea who is doing what work, and you'll probably be able to recognize authors' individual writing styles. I've been asked to review "anonymized" papers in the past, but with the exception of one which wasn't really in my field (I wrote back to tell the editor that I didn't think I was qualified to review the paper, and he found other referees) I've always been pretty sure who the authors were.
- beetle_b 18y ago
  >if you're prominent enough in a field to be asked to review papers, There aren't that many prominent people in a given discipline (and some of them do a poor job in reviewing anyway - slow, etc). It's quite normal to have a nonprominent person do the reviewing. This is, after all, peer reviewing.

by apu 18y ago

amichail 18y ago

Self-employment is much better in that respect. And BTW, it is exactly the desire for objective evaluation that has penalized interesting ideas (e.g., for web 2.0 apps) that are hard to evaluate using experiments/proofs. That's rather unfortunate.

cperciva 18y ago

At least in computer science, most of the major conferences are double-blind reviewed. This means that it's more difficult to figure out whose paper one is reviewing. Theoretically, yes. In practice, anonymizing work is hard to do -- if you're prominent enough in a field to be asked to review papers, you probably have a good idea who is doing what work, and you'll probably be able to recognize authors' individual writing styles. I've been asked to review "anonymized" papers in the past, but with the exception of one which wasn't really in my field (I wrote back to tell the editor that I didn't think I was qualified to review the paper, and he found other referees) I've always been pretty sure who the authors were.

beetle_b 18y ago
>if you're prominent enough in a field to be asked to review papers, There aren't that many prominent people in a given discipline (and some of them do a poor job in reviewing anyway - slow, etc). It's quite normal to have a nonprominent person do the reviewing. This is, after all, peer reviewing.