I think it depends on journal. However, that can only take place in single-blind peer review. Again, in my personal it contributes to biased judgement because that current work may be an improvement over the past. Taking the past to judge the current could lead to wrongful pre-judgement even before the work is accessed.

Indeed a reviewer should take a look at the track record of the author, in order to see if she/he has done good work before - which is basically to take a look at the papers that she/he has written already. In fact, that should have been done already by the handling editor, when deciding upon who should do the refereeing duties. By doing that the editor screens the manuscript in order to see if it merits a peer review at all. But of course the paper itself has a higher decision weight - an unknown author has - in that sense - a disadvantage, I should think, as a basically empty track record leaves little or no clues to the excellence (or not) of the author. Hence an already famous scholar has a clear advantage when the handling editor has a large pile to go through, and a high rejection rate figure as well.

It depends on whether a journal uses anonymous peer review. If so, the reviewers will not know who the author is (and the author will be required to remove self-citations from the manuscript).

The reviewing system of most big publishers allows to track previous paprers of the authors as well as similar topics of other authors and good reviewers should include already obtained achievements in the review process.

So the answer is YES.

Regards

GB

I think it depends on journal. However, that can only take place in single-blind peer review. Again, in my personal it contributes to biased judgement because that current work may be an improvement over the past. Taking the past to judge the current could lead to wrongful pre-judgement even before the work is accessed.

Hi,

In order not to influence the reviewers, I think authors are not recommended to add their self-citations in their manuscript. But in contrary they are recommended to do so after the acceptance of their paper.

Wassim,

self-citations sometimes are important for the topic you publish. There are numbers of research teams that work on one subject several years and are the only authors that published something important in the field - in such situations references to previous papers are useful for the readers.

regards,

GB

Well I seem to disagree with some folks on this question..... As a Reviewer for the last 20+ years of Peer Review articles & on an Editorial Board.... All the papers I have reviewed or sent out for Review are Blind to prevent biased reviews.... Either way, I would NOT recommend assessing previous works before reviewing a paper.... Reviews should be done on their own merit.... So something I published back in 1997 should hopefully not deter someone from accepting an article today in 2019 if it was a worthy piece...

Patricia: indeed, one cannot go back too far back in time, as their topics may have changed, and importantly they were less mature back when - as we also were! :-)

According to the discussion, some editors and reviewers consider previous papers of authors.

Do editors consider previous papers of all of the authors of the paper? or just consider the first author's papers?

One thing one may be sure of is that familiarity with an author will bias the judgement, at least some.

@Mustafa Bazghandi: of course the editors check all authors and their track record. At least I do, and those other editors that I know well. Just because their is a famous scholar among the authors does not mean that the paper will be excellent; there are many, many examples of that, I'm afraid ...

And to reiterate for the 500th time : there is no rule that the first author in the line of authors is the main author!! I hope we can come to terms with that, and if anyone thinks I am wrong I have about 150 manuscripts lying about in my office proving otherwise.