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Record W2905552054 · doi:10.1101/495465

The Case For and Against Double-blind Reviews

2018· preprint· en· W2905552054 on OpenAlexaff
Amelia R. Cox, Robert Montgomerie

Bibliographic record

VenuebioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2018
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
Topicscientometrics and bibliometrics research
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIbisDouble blindSociobiologyBehavioral ecologyPsychologyEcologyDisadvantagedBehavioural sciencesGender biasSocial psychologySociologyMedicineBiologyPolitical scienceAlternative medicinePsychotherapistAnthropologyLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

To date, the majority of authors on scientific publications have been men. While much of this gender bias can be explained by historic sexism and discrimination, there is concern that women may still be disadvantaged by the peer review process if reviewers' unconscious biases lead them to reject publications with female authors more often. One potential solution to this perceived gender bias in the reviewing process is for journals to adopt double-blind reviews whereby neither the authors nor the reviewers are aware of each other's identities and genders. To test the efficacy of double-blind reviews, we assigned gender to every authorship of every paper published in 5 different journals with different peer review processes (double-blind vs. single blind) and subject matter (birds vs. behavioral ecology) from 2010-2018 (n = 4865 papers). While female authorships comprised only 35% of the total, the double-blind journal Behavioral Ecology did not have more female authorships than its single-blind counterparts. Interestingly, the incidence of female authorship is higher at behavioral ecology journals (Behavioral Ecology and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology) than in the ornithology journals (Auk, Condor, Ibis), for papers on all topics as well as those on birds. These analyses suggest that double-blind review does not currently increase the incidence of female authorship in the journals studied here. We conclude, at least for these journals, that double-blind review does not benefit female authors and may, in the long run, be detrimental.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.839
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.899
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Evaluation · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.161
Threshold uncertainty score0.198

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.8390.899
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0040.005
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0110.009
Bibliometrics0.0160.011
Science and technology studies0.0090.051
Scholarly communication0.0260.033
Open science0.0130.017
Research integrity0.0470.037
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.008

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.432
GPT teacher head0.482
Teacher spread0.050 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainEvaluation
GenreCommentary

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2018
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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