The peer-review process is a crucial step in the modern scientific positive method. Often, academic journals use single-blind peer-reviews, where the name of the reviewers are not revealed to the authors of the submitted papers. However, one can find several drawbacks in this method. Here, we focus on the following drawback: referees may not spend enough time to do their review on a paper.
Obviously one does not have any statistics on the number of “botched reviews” – even characterizing what a “botched review” is seems to be delicate. However, it seems rather clear that a totally blind peer-review process leaves some space for some “laziness” from the reviewers. (In my field of research for instance – theoretical physics – I have seen published papers with computational errors from the first to the second equation of a manuscript – which would not have been possible if the referee(s) would have derived the equations in order to verify them.)
Of course, talking about “laziness” for voluntary works is ambiguous – and probably not deserved. However, the step of peer reviewing is crucial for the effectiveness of the scientific method. Therefore, one should try to avoid any lack of work during this crucial step of Science.
However, the question is: how to motivate such a dedication for a pure voluntary work?
Some may think about remuneration as a possible solution. Here we follow another idea.
A solution one can think about is the following:
Once a paper is accepted, the name of the referees who did accept the paper could be revealed within the content of the published version of the paper.
As far as I can see, it keeps all the reasons why one may want to use blind peer-reviews; but it enhances the process for the following reasons:
1/ Necessarily, it imposes the referees to be very cautious when accepting a paper. Indeed, their names being associated to a paper, they risk their reputations if the paper has severe verifiable mistakes in it. Therefore, it obligates referees to be, during their reviewing work, as cautious as they would be for their own research.
2/ It gives a recognition to the work of the referees who may have spent a big amount of time to read and check papers. Eventually, it could be a new source of reputation for researchers who participate in several different ways to the elaboration of our scientific knowledge. (Let us note that recognizing referees already seems to be a new trend in scientific publishing: see for instance the “outstanding referees” list of the APS journals (http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring-newsletter2013))
Possible drawbacks:
I imagine one possible drawback of doing so: referees could become less inclined to accept cutting edge research papers. However, I think this drawback may be counter-balanced by the will of researchers of having their own names (somehow) associated to a cutting edge discovery (through the revelation of the referees' names in the published version of a paper).
Your comments:
I would like to hear your comments upon this proposal. Whether you think it is a good or a bad idea, I just would like to know what the reasons are. Also, please indicate your field of research as this proposal might not be adequate for every field of research.
Thank you for your time and your attention!
I believe it should be very important to reveal the reviewer name in order to limit cronyism (pro/contra). I don't see relevant drawbacks for a good reviewer (possibly trained in reviewing).
I am in Theoretical Physics as well. I think you are making a good point in calling attention on this topic, and trying to solve it with positive proposals; I also never thought at your solution, which I find very original, although, as you have already pointed out, the drawback is a risky one; for some reason that at the moment is obscure, referees are already little inclined to accept cutting-edge research papers, and if this trend should also become justified, there would be no cutting-edge research papers at all in a while. In a moment in which we need flow of new ideas, blocking all high-risk/high-reward papers is counter-productive. Also, we cannot afford to pay referees, since there seem to be little money for the research itself; nor can we hope that people are willing to accept the referee task offered by a journal and actually do the job, because people must accept when offered to referee, since it makes some CV entry, but they do not necessarily have time to referee it, since there is other to do. Put like that seems bad indeed.
However, it is even worse than that: even when the referee accept the offer of refereeing a paper and he is actually not lazy, we are still left with the fact that a single person, or at most a couple of people, have the task to judge your work; now the idea of having your worked, which might account for months of your career, blocked by the action of a few persons, whom might not be lazy but could simply be incompetent or merely honestly mistaken, is certainly not democratic. The situation for which some colleagues or competitors have the unilateral power to negatively affect you work without you could be able to defend yourself, if not affect them back, is obviously not a "peer" review process.
So, I like the fact that you put the problem on the table, to which I wanted to pile up some more; however, differently from you, I got no suggestion on how to improve it.
Maybe I will be back with something in a while.
And here is the link...
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0026895
Some journals do it, they mention the names of the referees either in their web sites or in one of its volumes, i think it is enough. or should they state which papers were refereed by who?
I believe that, at least when the paper is published, reviewers should be identified. An interesting discussion was presented in a blog by a former editor of the BMJ.
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2011/11/11/richard-smith-a-woeful-tale-of-the-uselessness-of-peer-review/
A nice post on the topic: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Signed_reviews_and_the_future_of_peer_reviewing
Imagine the following situation: I am a reviewer of some manuscript, I express a serious critisism regarding the first version of the paper, after extensive corrections the paper is finally published along with my name as its referee. After some time I submit my manuscript, it goes to one of the authors of the abovementioned paper, who had an additional work to do because of my report, but for some reason he does not appreciate that because of this work their manuscript became better:-) Now: don't you think that some sort of people could reject my paper just to show how important they are? According to your recipe: no published paper, no referee names, so this action will be completely anonymous.
Tatiana, you are right, but your argument is based on bad attitudes of people; then with the same logic one should not only avoid to place referees names but also authors names, because some may reject a paper just because they already had personal issues with a given author: for instance I have personally heard from one person who is a referee for PRD that he does reject papers from India, simply because he has had a bad experience with Indians and now assumes that papers coming from Indian institutions cannot be good. So then the best would be to place no name at all.
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