At the root of this proposal is the fantasy that scientists would somehow be selfless adherents to the alter of the scientific method. They give up all honor, pride and recognition so that the "scientific method" be protected from the often selfish desires of human beings.
In the real world, having names on papers is a really good thing. In real academia, I've heard professors say "well that work was done by so-and-so, and they're bad researchers so I don't trust their results".
There's this popular misconception that just because something is published in a peer-reviewed journal that it must be true. Nobody in research actually believes that. All it means is the authors were able to convince the reviewers and the peer reviewers to publish it.
What if papers were cryptographically signed so that they can be claimed later and there were a period of, say, one year of anonymity after publication? This period would allow things like peer review and initial recognition of the paper to occur with less social bias.
Just as important would be institutional anonymity. A paper from Nowheresville should be considered equally to a paper from Harvard.
Finally I think papers should be required in their headings to disclose sources of funding for the work therein, although this would have to be done later so as not to indirectly compromise the anonymity period.
Both have pros and cons. One con with having names on a paper is that it can give it attention purely because of the authors name at the expense of something else.
However I agree that scientist wouldn't do it (which kind of supports the idea of nameless papers IMO)
One of the journals in my field requires you to strip out all identifiers before submission. This is remarkably difficult. Consider the things that might give you away:
- GitHub, FigShare, institutional repositories etc. for code and data
- Information on the location of the study
- Statistical packages used (hope you didn't author the one you're using)
Of course, anonymity will be shattered the moment anyone talks about their work at a conference. Furthermore, several systematic reviews and meta-analysis studies I've worked on benefitted greatly from being able to email the authors directly with questions.
I'd also be concerned that people will mentally assign things to a "Big Name" in the field anyway. "Ah, another paper on HAART. Must be out of so-and-so's lab..."
Sure- you can absolutely figure out who wrote the paper given enough work. Yet, I really do like the idea of first the paper being reviewed on it's own merit/ideas/findings, and then potentially people seeing who was involved as a secondary thing at some later point after judgements had already been made.
Well, there's "stripping out identifiers" and then there's "FBI-proof OPSEC" -- no one is going to run your word corpus through stylometric analysis, removing obvious links should be enough.
Makes me wonder if you could implement the exporting of a "review" version in LaTeX, similar to a debug mode -- set a flag, and any content with an {ID} wrapper around it gets left out or is substituted for something anonymous.
"(AUTHOR et al.) performed a small scale lab study. (ANONYMOUS SUBMISSION) performed that exact same study, on hundreds of people, and expand on the work of authors..."
Yes. When I was doing peer review work in my field (Mass Com), it took about a year to get the landscape sorted. That includes being able to ID people behind submissions, based on writing style.
Unfortunately, I saw submissions get down voted not because of the content, but because of some long standing intellectual feud (I found this out after I became a sought-after "tie breaker." The journal editors figured out I was indeed casting votes based solely on the submission in hand).
Not only that, but you inevitably self-site your earlier work in your later work. In most cases, the most cited author in a paper is the author of the paper itself. So just look at the last page of the paper, and you can probably tell who wrote it.
The landscape of incentives within scientific publishing is complicated. You have to map out what drives each of the parties: journals, authors, reviewers, readers.
Journals want high-quality submissions from well-known authors in order to maintain the brand. They also want ongoing subscription fees.
Authors want to be published in good journals, but they also want raw publication count to be high. So the primary incentive may not be intellectual honesty.
Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're reviewing, hence the term peer-review. They have an incentive to prevent publication of competing work.
Readers want all knowledge to be free, so they have an incentive to not pay for journals. They also want to know which works are important and which are crock, so name-recognition comes into play.
I've probably left something out, but you get the idea. Coming up with new ideas is fun, but until you align the incentives, nothing meaningful will happen. And you've got hundreds of years of inertia and thousands of careers in the balance.
"Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're reviewing, hence the term peer-review. They have an incentive to prevent publication of competing work."
This seems backwards to me. There isn't a fixed amount of interest in a field that is captured by peers. If others in your industry are getting attention then it draws attention to your industry as a whole. I'd think reviewers would be biased towards having competing work published not against.
While I'm not sure about the complete anonymity suggested by Hanel, I do wish that journals would move to double-blind reviews. It would not be perfect, as often research know enough to guess who the authors might be, but it would still reduce bias.
Wouldn't work. Gotta justify getting your grants by being able to point to previously published work.
Plus, everyone can tell who did what-- if not exactly who, then one of a small (5-10) group of people who are likely in the same geographical location.
How would one decide who gets tenure, promotion and raises if all papers are anonymous? Once universal basic income is implemented, maybe. Meanwhile, no.
No, but it would be nice if we had a place where we could discuss scientific papers anonymously. Of course, to keep things concentrated, it would be nice if there was exactly one such place.
I understand though that simple anonymous comments don't cut it. It can devolve into youtube comments quickly -- personal attacks to the authors, low effort comments, spamming, "trolling", etc.
Those sites need a private reputation system: you can vote comments but the commentator is anonymous; it's hidden reputation should help sorting the comments.
I think the main issue here is the problem of bias in the scientific community. Anonymity is just one proposed solution. There could be others.
We should remember that there are three major forms of incentive in the scientific community :
1. Prestige (requires name)
2. Salary and grants (requires credentials, and hence names)
3. The joy of analysis and discovery (doesn't require names)
(I might have missed some forms of incentives, but these seem to be the major ones to me.)
Anonymity will take the top two incentives away. The second one is a very practical one. There's an existing competition for salary and grants, a pretty brutal one in some areas where money is scarce. We need to solve this problem first before the concept of anonymity can be realistically entertained.
I have heard other proposals for reducing bias that seem more tangible. One of them is democratization (partially or fully) of peer review in a centralized publication system (like arxiv).
Peer review can apply the scientific method to the paper well enough. This may take time. That is just fine.
People having their names on papers helps with motivation to publish in most cases, and it's good to understand who contributed what when trying to understand how an idea has formed and who might be with collaborating or talking to.
Some topics may be difficult politically. Those are special cases that can and should warrant doing whatever it takes to insure publication and the safety of the scientist.
There are also ethics. Anon publishing may well increase questionable research. This should fall into the special case bucket too, as it overlaps with politics.
That previous discussion is of a different article by a different author, but, yes, this issue deserves a lot of discussion. The article submitted to open this thread is by two authors who follow the research literature on this topic closely and who review much of the prior literature in their commentary article.
It sounds like a good idea for the topics that are highly skewed by the political agenda. Like global warming.
Imagine a situation when some climatologist makes a discovery that global warming is a fluke. In the current political climate no reputable journal will accept his article on this topic. Moreover, no scientist will even SUBMIT one because of the possible damages to his reputation.
On the condition of anonymity, it may stand a chance.
Simple solution is to have blind and double blind reviews. People write papers not only for the greater good but also to improve their careers and profiles. Because thats the only way to get more funding to do more work.
By mandating blind reviews, the bias can be removed easily.
There are many who give good/bad reviews just by looking at the authors names, not everyone of course.
I am not sure why blind reviews are not mandatory by now
Better idea: Submit it anonymously with your public PKI hash. Then wait X years (5?) and optionally announce yourself by signing the hash to prove you are the author. That way, enough time is given to have the content unbiasedly considered, yet you still get to take credit a bit later.
The correct term is not anonymized, but de-identified.
This wouldn't work in almost any field because the community can already tell with high accuracy who the peer reviewers are, and it's usually easy to tell who wrote a paper by the language style and the conclusions.
[+] [-] rubidium|10 years ago|reply
In the real world, having names on papers is a really good thing. In real academia, I've heard professors say "well that work was done by so-and-so, and they're bad researchers so I don't trust their results".
There's this popular misconception that just because something is published in a peer-reviewed journal that it must be true. Nobody in research actually believes that. All it means is the authors were able to convince the reviewers and the peer reviewers to publish it.
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
Just as important would be institutional anonymity. A paper from Nowheresville should be considered equally to a paper from Harvard.
Finally I think papers should be required in their headings to disclose sources of funding for the work therein, although this would have to be done later so as not to indirectly compromise the anonymity period.
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
Both have pros and cons. One con with having names on a paper is that it can give it attention purely because of the authors name at the expense of something else.
However I agree that scientist wouldn't do it (which kind of supports the idea of nameless papers IMO)
[+] [-] otakucode|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fomite|10 years ago|reply
- GitHub, FigShare, institutional repositories etc. for code and data
- Information on the location of the study
- Statistical packages used (hope you didn't author the one you're using)
Of course, anonymity will be shattered the moment anyone talks about their work at a conference. Furthermore, several systematic reviews and meta-analysis studies I've worked on benefitted greatly from being able to email the authors directly with questions.
I'd also be concerned that people will mentally assign things to a "Big Name" in the field anyway. "Ah, another paper on HAART. Must be out of so-and-so's lab..."
[+] [-] tibbon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wingman4l7|10 years ago|reply
Makes me wonder if you could implement the exporting of a "review" version in LaTeX, similar to a debug mode -- set a flag, and any content with an {ID} wrapper around it gets left out or is substituted for something anonymous.
[+] [-] greggarious|10 years ago|reply
"(AUTHOR et al.) performed a small scale lab study. (ANONYMOUS SUBMISSION) performed that exact same study, on hundreds of people, and expand on the work of authors..."
[+] [-] peter303|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikeNomad|10 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, I saw submissions get down voted not because of the content, but because of some long standing intellectual feud (I found this out after I became a sought-after "tie breaker." The journal editors figured out I was indeed casting votes based solely on the submission in hand).
[+] [-] cschmidt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarkmoody|10 years ago|reply
Journals want high-quality submissions from well-known authors in order to maintain the brand. They also want ongoing subscription fees.
Authors want to be published in good journals, but they also want raw publication count to be high. So the primary incentive may not be intellectual honesty.
Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're reviewing, hence the term peer-review. They have an incentive to prevent publication of competing work.
Readers want all knowledge to be free, so they have an incentive to not pay for journals. They also want to know which works are important and which are crock, so name-recognition comes into play.
I've probably left something out, but you get the idea. Coming up with new ideas is fun, but until you align the incentives, nothing meaningful will happen. And you've got hundreds of years of inertia and thousands of careers in the balance.
[+] [-] digbyloftus|10 years ago|reply
This seems backwards to me. There isn't a fixed amount of interest in a field that is captured by peers. If others in your industry are getting attention then it draws attention to your industry as a whole. I'd think reviewers would be biased towards having competing work published not against.
[+] [-] rwj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryoshon|10 years ago|reply
Plus, everyone can tell who did what-- if not exactly who, then one of a small (5-10) group of people who are likely in the same geographical location.
[+] [-] ninguem2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkmighty|10 years ago|reply
I understand though that simple anonymous comments don't cut it. It can devolve into youtube comments quickly -- personal attacks to the authors, low effort comments, spamming, "trolling", etc.
Those sites need a private reputation system: you can vote comments but the commentator is anonymous; it's hidden reputation should help sorting the comments.
[+] [-] tokenadult|10 years ago|reply
Have you looked at PubPeer? There have been some very interesting posts there.
https://pubpeer.com/
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] steinsgate|10 years ago|reply
We should remember that there are three major forms of incentive in the scientific community :
1. Prestige (requires name) 2. Salary and grants (requires credentials, and hence names) 3. The joy of analysis and discovery (doesn't require names)
(I might have missed some forms of incentives, but these seem to be the major ones to me.)
Anonymity will take the top two incentives away. The second one is a very practical one. There's an existing competition for salary and grants, a pretty brutal one in some areas where money is scarce. We need to solve this problem first before the concept of anonymity can be realistically entertained.
I have heard other proposals for reducing bias that seem more tangible. One of them is democratization (partially or fully) of peer review in a centralized publication system (like arxiv).
[+] [-] ddingus|10 years ago|reply
Peer review can apply the scientific method to the paper well enough. This may take time. That is just fine.
People having their names on papers helps with motivation to publish in most cases, and it's good to understand who contributed what when trying to understand how an idea has formed and who might be with collaborating or talking to.
Some topics may be difficult politically. Those are special cases that can and should warrant doing whatever it takes to insure publication and the safety of the scientist.
There are also ethics. Anon publishing may well increase questionable research. This should fall into the special case bucket too, as it overlaps with politics.
[+] [-] mynegation|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smikhanov|10 years ago|reply
Imagine a situation when some climatologist makes a discovery that global warming is a fluke. In the current political climate no reputable journal will accept his article on this topic. Moreover, no scientist will even SUBMIT one because of the possible damages to his reputation.
On the condition of anonymity, it may stand a chance.
[+] [-] bitwize|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skynetv2|10 years ago|reply
By mandating blind reviews, the bias can be removed easily.
There are many who give good/bad reviews just by looking at the authors names, not everyone of course.
I am not sure why blind reviews are not mandatory by now
[+] [-] adeptus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|10 years ago|reply
This wouldn't work in almost any field because the community can already tell with high accuracy who the peer reviewers are, and it's usually easy to tell who wrote a paper by the language style and the conclusions.
[+] [-] jpambrun|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] platz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgayham|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]