5 ms·
I've served on the program committee of the main conference in my field. It has double-blind review. In about 60% of the good quality papers I knew the person o
by sago 12y ago
I've served on the program committee of the main conference in my field. It has double-blind review. In about 60% of the good quality papers I knew the person or team doing the work. In another 30% of the cases doing a literature search for other work pertaining to their sub-field showed who the team/person was. Most of the papers that were totally unknown to me were not very good. So I'm not sure how well double-blind review actually works for scientific specialities. Someone who is expert enough to properly evaluate a piece of research is likely to recognize the research focus of most significant groups in their field.
- scott_s 12y agoWhen I review a double-blind paper, I consider it part of my duty as a reviewer to avoid figuring out who wrote the paper. Sometimes I will accidentally figure it out when I look at related papers, in order to better understand the contribution. But even when I realize "Oh, right, it's probably the same group," there's still some unknowns in who, exactly, the authors are, and their order. (In my area, mostly computer science systems, author order roughly maps to amount of contribution.) I'm usually a sub-reviewer, not usually on the program committee. And some of the conferences I review for are general enough that I may get papers in my general area, but not my current focus. So it may not make as much of a difference for the program committee of a tightly focused conference, but it may for all other cases.