In recent years, authors are increasingly posting their manuscripts to preprint servers before they are officially peer-reviewed in social science journals. How anonymous is the 'anonymous' or double-blind peer review process when referees could easily surmise the identity of authors through preprint servers? The central agenda of the blinding practice is to conceal the identities of the reviewer(s) and author(s) from both parties, throughout the review process. Is the preprint practice in itself to be seen as an 'enemy' of the double-blind review process in social science?
I think that you are right. The authors in double blind peer review should post their manuscripts to preprint servers after they are officially peer-reviewed in social science journals.
I think that you are right. The authors in double blind peer review should post their manuscripts to preprint servers after they are officially peer-reviewed in social science journals.
The double-blind peer review process seems to me to be plagued with all kinds of enemies, not just this one. For one, authors love citing themselves. Even if they--as protocol requires--take out their name in the bibliography, one can easily search their previous published work. Second, peer-reviewers are experts in niche fields, where the universe of researchers is very small. We all know what we're working on, and so can guess at the identity of the author. Third, even if there isn't a pre-print available, researchers will often post what they are working on, which is also 'discoverable.' So I wouldn't necessarily say preprint is the bugbear of double-blind peer review.
Would it be sensible for an author submitting work for double-blind peer review to post it to a repository at all? As this action is entirely in the hands of the authors, it is one that they are free to decide not to take. Similarly, they can choose to avoid extensive self-citation, however as research work is often built upon earlier studies, some degree of self-citation is likely, and probably desirable. The very fact that there is a need to preserve anonymity could be beneficial for the community by curbing excessive self-citation.
Other identifying factors are more tricky:
- abstracts for talks presented at conferences are generally available online;
- if a manuscript has been submitted to a journal that does not operate a double-blind peer review and was rejected, the reviewers approached in association with the new submission might have seen the paper before;
- those involved in making funding decisions or evaluating university research programmes might have seen the work on a previous occasion.
With respect to the choice of reviewers, journals often choose to use only one suggestion made by the authors as a deliberate means of trying to avoid authors pushing their work through to publication by suggesting reviewers who they believe will be biased in their favour. This means that the choice of keywords for a database search become more important: If concerned about the sufficient appropriate reviewers being chosen consider the keywords, title, abstract and conclusions of the paper from the point of view of someone selecting search words for a database search as these parts of the text are likely to be used to decide on a suitable reviewer.
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