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Record W2952901605 · doi:10.7717/peerj.6702

The cases for and against double-blind reviews

2019· article· en· W2952901605 on OpenAlexaff
Amelia R. Cox, Robert Montgomerie

Bibliographic record

VenuePeerJ · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
Topicscientometrics and bibliometrics research
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIbisDouble blindSociobiologyGender biasPsychologyBehavioral ecologyDisadvantagedEcologySocial psychologyMedicineSociologyPolitical scienceBiologyAlternative medicineLawAnthropology

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’ 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 identity and gender. To test the efficacy of double-blind reviews in one behavioral ecology journal ( Behavioral Ecology , BE), we assigned gender to every authorship of every paper published for 2010–2018 in that journal compared to four other journals with single-blind reviews but similar subject matter and impact factors. While female authorships comprised only 35% of the total in all journals, the double-blind journal (BE) did not have more female authorships than its single-blind counterparts. Interestingly, the incidence of female authorship is higher at behavioral ecology journals (BE 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 no longer benefits female authors and we discuss the pros and cons of the double-blind reviewing process based on our findings.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.021
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.021
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Bibliometrics, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.852
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0210.021
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0060.035
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0020.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.001

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 head0.824
GPT teacher head0.640
Teacher spread0.184 · 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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

Citations65
Published2019
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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