On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Alexander Dekhtyar wrote:
> I would like to stress this point. Double-blind reviewing will be
> ineffective in hiding the identity of the authors in relatively small
> communities where the reviewers would most likely have heard of the
> previous work of the authors. IJCAI or SIGMOD are conferences that
> represent much larger communities than the UAI community, and there
> double blind reviewing is more justified and, perhaps, more effective.
With respect to the size of the community, this can become something of a
self-fulfilling prophecy. i.e. if the reviewing process is too "cliquish"
then the pool of contributors may decline, making the community still
smaller, leading ultimately to stagnation.
It might be argued that in small communities double-blind reviewing is
more necessary since such communities are likely to be less accustomed to
seeing papers written by "outsiders". However, such papers may potentially
be very important in bringing a much-needed fresh perspective.
> Double blind reviewing also somewhat disfavors papers that are followups
> of previously published work by the same researchers as no longer
> the "in our previous work we did ..." references are acceptable. Replacing
> with with "A and B did ... We extend this work ..." sometimes does not do
> enough to hide the identity of the authors.
Again, this is arguable. If the paper is not worth publishing on its own
merits, but only as a follow-up (appendix?) to another more interesting
paper, then perhaps this suggests that the paper should be rejected!
Thomas Richardson
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