To MGS: Blind reviews are OK if you really do not know whose paper you are reviewing. It happened to me several times that names of the autor(s) were hidden, but out of curiosity, I looked at the bibliography to realize exactly whose work was in my hands. As long as we do not use our position as revewiers to go nasty against someone, then it is OK to review papers of people we know.

Also, the authors quickly realize who may be the author of the review by its style, punctuation, etc. Serios people do not play this cat & mouse game, for goodness of the process

When you are reviewing a paper of your colleague or friend and you find something which is corrigible, take your mask off and communicate expressis verbis to make appropriate corrections. I think it is honest. In the worst case, you may refuse reviewing.

Well, it should not be. If you are at a position to review an article of your colleague and can provide valid inputs to make the publication better, then why not? You should go ahead and proceed if you think you can remain unbiased to the fact that you may know the person. If not, you can request the editor to not consider you, citing certain reasons and you may suggest a new reviewer to him/ her.

If you know people in your field of research, the field is not too big, and you avoid reviewing people you know, then you are almost useless as a reviewer :)

I usually do not agree to review manuscripts of those people with whom I have a joint project in progress.

In an ideal world, you would have only to review papers of those authors whom you do not know, or who do not know you. But sometimes it happens there is a connection to a reviewer because the editor cannot find a better match. Then things rely mostly on a mutual conscience. After all, if a 'lemon' is put to print, sooner or later, some reader detects how shallow a publication may be.

On the other side of the stick: What to do when research is interdisciplinary and there are no adequate reviewers? It happened to me twice that the journal's editor had difficulty in assigning a proper person. Seeking a right reviewer took a lot of time, but eventually the process went through.

Thanks for your answers. My question is not about something that happened to me, but I always wonder if it is good to put the power in the hands of reviewers who may be able to recognize author(s), whereas authors are completetly left in the dark. I feel this is somehow biased and unbalance in terms of an asymmetrical power relation. Of course, it is a matter of personal conscience and it is true that once you go to your very narrow niche potential reviewers are somewhat limited. Even more so, accepting that a relatively restricted circle of people review your work and you review theirs may be utterly useless - even though I don't know how this could be changed.

Maria Grazia Sindoni

In my opinion it is not at all unethical to review manuscripts of researchers you know in person. If you work in a relatively specialized field (which most researchers do) the community is not very large. After some time you get to know many people who work in the same area e.g. when attending conferences. Thus I have reviewed quite a few manuscripts from colleagues I know and vice versa. In all cases I gave my best to be fair and objective, and I think my colleagues did the same. Of course, the situation is different when you have previous joint publications or reserach projects with such colleagues. In such cases I always declined the review requests.

In my opinion, one can review papers of people he/she knows. The main thing is to be objective and fair. One has to make abstraction of who the author is and do honestly the work. There is no unethical thing here, provided objectivity, honesty and fairness are applied.

thanks for yyour answers. However, don't you think that the very idea of being "subjective" and "fair" is problematic? On another matter, I've come to the conclusion that blind reviews sometimes bring out the worst in scholars. I doubt one would be mean and nasty if they had to reveal their own names. What do you think?

As far as you're referencing is worth-referencing depending on your topic, my reply would be a NO.

To MGS: Blind reviews are OK if you really do not know whose paper you are reviewing. It happened to me several times that names of the autor(s) were hidden, but out of curiosity, I looked at the bibliography to realize exactly whose work was in my hands. As long as we do not use our position as revewiers to go nasty against someone, then it is OK to review papers of people we know.

Also, the authors quickly realize who may be the author of the review by its style, punctuation, etc. Serios people do not play this cat & mouse game, for goodness of the process

When you are reviewing a paper of your colleague or friend and you find something which is corrigible, take your mask off and communicate expressis verbis to make appropriate corrections. I think it is honest. In the worst case, you may refuse reviewing.

I compleletly agree with Pr. Roman Sznajder. It is not difficult to know whose paper you are reviewing, especially if the author is a colleague of a friend of yours. But when you do, you should act as if you do not know the author. One should be able to reject a paper of none's son or daughter, if it is scientifically to be rejected.

Thanks Maryam Alibeigi , Roman Sznajder and Lahbib Oubbi for your thoughful comments. Just to narrow down my idea:

when I say "know", I mean personally, with work interactions or with previous collaboration. _Once we assume that in every field the community of reference is not infinite, it can be assumed as well that year by year you got to know - at least superficially - a lot of people you might be a potential reviewer of.

Having said that, I think that anonymysing procedures should be strenghtened (for example, it is NOT a good idea to put Author and then full title, year, journal, etc. in the references, so that every one, out of curiosity can click and find who the author is. It is a GOOD practice to anonymyse as follows (Author 2013). So that is becomes much more difficult to guess who the author is.

But, then again, I feel that a really objective and neutral review does not exist, and this is even more true when you have acquaintance of, or have worked with the author.

Hi Barry Lee Reynolds and thanks for your comment, actually I wasn't aware of that. Do you work in the area of social sciences? I'm a linguist and I've never been asked to remove the self-citation in these terms (Author ....), even though I limit self-citations and use them only when necessary. I find what they told you somehow disingenuous because if you have previous research in the specific topic you're still working on and are in fact building on previuos research, how should you prove that your work is grounded on other work? That it does not come out of the blue? Anonymity should be prioritized over the fact that the referred paper or book can't be read by the reviewer, shouldn't be?

A journal once asked me to review the work of a friend -- someone I know better than a casual acquaintance. I knew it was their work because I knew they were working on the study.

Before accepting, I replied to the editor and divulged the fact, and said that I thought that I COULD be impartial. The editor told me to proceed.

I made my friend do a revision and my friend does not know to this day that I was the reviewer. 🙂