Double-blind reviews kinda' sorta' work. I've watched several research
communities address this question. Some of the cryptography conferences
use double-blind reviewing. It means that no one should refer to
"in our earlier work, ...." And it means that reviewers are sometimes
mistaken in their assumptions about the authors. But political decisions
are sometimes made.
In the structural complexity community, this idea is brought up once
in a while and dismissed. The community is small enough and tight
enough that people tend to know about papers (not all, but a significant
number) before they are submitted, and tend to recognize writing styles.
At best, blind reviewing would simply remind the reviewers that they
are supposed to be ignoring personal opinions about the authors. I guess
that community trusts its reviewers to do so without that form of
reminder.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2001 - 11:15:26 PST