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In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
People say journals are a crapshoot but is there a way of getting lucky with journals that's not just pure chance? I feel I've been extra lucky with top journals, even with papers that I thought weren't as good. Maybe I sound like someone with imposter syndrome but I'm wondering if people google the paper title and decide to greenlight my paper because they like me as a person.
What do readers think?
Some referees might do this, but it’s generally considered unethical since it breaches anonymity. You should also not have the titles of your papers under review listed on your CV so that they are findable on Google.
I know that some reviewers do Google paper titles. Why they do this I can’t say. Guesses might include in the best case seeing what else is out there recently on the topic, and worst case trying to identify the author.
It raises questions as to whether people should put the titles of works in progress/under review on their websites and what they see as the benefits of doing this despite the clear risks of compromising peer review. It might also come up as the title of talk that was presented at a conference on someone’s website or CV, of course, too and be a tell even if unintentionally so.
During the review process? Never. Afterwards, occasionally–when it’s been a while and I wonder whether the paper is out anywhere yet (e.g. to cite it), I might run a quick search.
I do not do this. Nobody has ever told me they do this. People should not do this.
I 100% do this. Everyone I know well enough to ask reports having done this. Lots of people pretend they don’t. People who tell you you shouldn’t are being bizarrely sanctimonious and should ride shorter horses and maybe find more important things to waste their anger on.
Anonymous peer review is both silly and fake and the fact that we pretend we do it is one of the reasons (albeit a small reason) why many other fields think we philosophers are silly.
If people are accepting your papers in part because you’re a good person, that seems fine to me. There are enough assholes in our field that rewarding the nice people seems like an ok practice.
I have never done this. I do not think anyone should do this. Nobody has ever admitted to me that they do this. It seems to violate the entire point of blind review. I would look down on anyone who suggested to me that they do this.
I always Google the paper and then accept/reject based on where the author attended grad school.
The people who say journals are a crapshoot are wrong. And, I do not Google paper titles. I have refereed 200+ papers … I do not have time to do all that Googling
I do not google papers. I have never accepted a referee request if I think I know the identity of the author(s). I even rarely found out who wrote the paper I refereed in the past. (recently, I came across a paper published by a top expert at a top specialized journal that I rejected, which surprised me… but this has been the only case.)
I would never do this and am shocked that someone would. just decline the invitation to review if you’re going to undermine the procedure damn
How on earth can you not know the identity of the authors of the papers you referee? I referee at MINIMUM a dozen papers a year. Many years it’s more. I probably know exactly who the author is 75% of the time. For the remainder I can nearly always narrow it down to two or three suspects. That’s when I often Google. BTW, if I said no, these requests would just go to someone else in the exact same boat. Editors clearly know this. They often say so implicitly. Sometimes they say so explicitly.
Why can I do this? Because I know the people in my subfield. They’re my friends. I talk to them, often. I know what they work on. We bounce ideas off each other. And because I’ve read their work and know how they write. And because who else but Dr. Obscruo is going to be citing Obscure Paper Number 7, forthcoming: Journal of Obscureness?
I can only conclude that all of you who say you referee blind all the time must be involved in some part of the field where there are bizarrely large numbers of people all conversant in each other’s work. Either that or you’re recluses who have no friends or no sense of what your friends are working on. Or maybe you’re just bad at drawing obvious conclusions? Or great at pretending to not draw them? Either way the field of philosophy you’re experiencing is wildly different from the one I experience.
(Also fwiw, I’m not prestigious by training or by employment and I doubt there’s a single philosopher at a top ten school who knows my name. So don’t try to explain this in that way.)
Actually I’ll add a bit more: not only do I almost always know who the authors of the papers I referee are, it’s also very common that I can guess who the authors of my referee reports are. Maybe the parts of philosophy you all work in are different, but over here where I live the idea that you possibly could do these things in a genuinely blind way is obviously silly and generally laughed at.
@Recently promoted: With respect to whether I am “involved in some part of the field where there are bizarrely large numbers of people all conversant in each other’s work” or a recluse with no friends or no sense of what my friends are working on, it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. I work mostly in ethics and political philosophy and most of the topics I work on are large enough that I don’t know everyone personally. Even for incredibly niche topics (like the normativity of requests, which is one thing I work on) sometimes new people enter the field (like a graduate student I recently met over email) so when I see a paper I haven’t read before I can’t know who wrote it unless I’ve talked about it with them or whatever. That brings us to the second part, which is that I live in India and for practical and moral reasons I am not a fan of travel, which means I rarely meet people at conferences or whatever, and there aren’t a lot of people I keep in touch with online either.
(You also raise the possibilities that I’m “just bad at drawing obvious conclusions” or that I’m “great at pretending to not draw them.” I don’t think those are accurate characterizations of me.)
As for “who else but Dr. Obscuro is going to cite…” perhaps the citation norms in your subfield(s) are different from those in mine, but I read plenty of papers (both when I’m refereeing and when I’m reading published stuff) that cite relatively obscure papers. Anyone who cites me cites relatively obscure stuff, and I’m not literally the only one who cites me. I definitely referee papers that cite me which someone who thinks they’re good at figuring this stuff out might think were written by me.
I think if I lived in America or another philosophically richer country and if I traveled more and if I were much more social it would be harder for me to anonymously review stuff, but even then I work in enough different subsubfields that are large enough that I think I would still get plenty of referee requests for papers where I would have literally no idea who the author is, or where I would have a guess but it wouldn’t be a certain guess.
(I also am not angry about people who Google paper titles, as you characterize people like me in an earlier post. I suppose I am sanctimonious and I am riding around on a high horse insofar as thinking someone ought not to Google paper titles entails sanctimony and tall horses, but I’ve never felt the force of those kinds of insults, so I don’t really mind when they’re applied to me.)
The comments by “Recently Promoted” strike me as condescending and inaccurate. To offer one example, I teach, publish, regularly in areas like environmental ethics and procreative ethics. I absolutely do not know the identity of the author of the vast majority of papers I am invited to review. In the few cases I have, I have declined the invitation to review. I do not see how I could know what the hundreds of people working in those subfields are doing at a particular moment in time. I teach 3 classes per semester, serve on various university and college-level committees, and only have travel funding to attend 1 or 2 conferences per year to get exposed to work in progress: there’s not sufficient time to keep up with every work in progress everyone is producing. This does not mean that I have no friends or am professionally disinterested or incompetent.
I am aware of niche subfields where the prominent debates appear to be occurring dominantly between only 10-15 scholars in the English-speaking world, but a lot of areas of philosophy are not like that. I also don’t see how one could know the identity of early career philosophers who are trying to enter into ongoing discussions but are not yet known by anyone in the profession at large, and since early career scholars are highly pressured to publish early and often, that’s a large portion of what referees are going to end up reviewing.
Recently Promoted, perhaps it is just that some people more clearly belong to a distinct small subfield than others, or that some choose to only referee in that subfield while others choose to referee a bit more broadly? I usually do not know who the authors are of papers I referee. Sometimes I have had very strong suspicions, but it has later turned out that those suspicions were mistaken
If I am certain about who the author/s is/are (and this certainly happens occasionally), I tell the editor before I accept the request to review. Sometimes editors then ask me to referee anyway, sometimes they look for someone else. Don’t editors expect people to inform them if they know the author’s identity? I suspect they do. (I am an area editor at Ergo, but Ergo’s policy stated in the invitation to referee is that one should decline without explanation if one knows the author’s identity, so no one ever tells me this.)
Why do you often Google when you cannot single out who the author is? Is this just a matter of satisfying your curiosity or does it serve some other purpose?
@Recently promoted, what field are you in?
I’m really astonished by the couple of people who admit to googling the papers they review. Even if you think blind review is pointless or if you believe you can already guess the author…what is the purpose of googling? Will being certain of the author’s identity change how you review the content of the paper?
I wonder what field of philosophy Recently Promoted works in. It sounds problematically insular if there are seldom papers to review from new people. I just reviewed a paper on exactly my small niche subspecialty and I have no idea who wrote it – perhaps a current graduate student. Of course I did not attempt to google them, because what would be the point? I’ll find out once the paper is published.
I recently refereed a paper which was good in a lot of ways but which lacked a main thesis and argument worth publishing. It was a sort of “Hey, look at this undiscussed phenomenon,” but without a good overall point about it, or some big implication to draw from its existence. Like a song with some good verses, riffs and bridges, but no chorus. I sent my report that shared this assessment, which was pretty negative (albeit polite).
Then, at some point later, I came across the paper — it was on some colloquium website featuring speakers in my subfield — with the author’s identity, and woe…they’re a big shot! And someone I happen to know and like and respect as a philosopher, and as a person. It made me wonder if the journal editors felt the same way about them (everyone likes them), and so might, er, “misconstrue” my report as a mixed review (it wasn’t).
Sure enough, just got the word: it’s R&R. And no, this journal doesn’t R&R easily; generally it rejects anything both refs aren’t glowing about. I can only imagine an exception was made because of who the author is. And I dread the next round, because if they read my report carefully, they’ll notice that I recommend no revision they could helpfully provide, except, at most, “come up with a great point about all this (which you haven’t yet).”
@Inside Job,
The silver lining is that if they’re a really good philosopher, as you seem to suggest, they might well read your report and agree with it! Here’s hoping that their revised version will include a section discussing implications or something like that. I don’t think that’s out of order for an R&R to advise, and it sounds like it would make the paper a lot better.
what field is @recently promoted in? I am surprised that editors would implicitly allow breaching of anonymity if the journal is strictly blinded.
And yes, if I receive papers closest to my expertise, I usually know who wrote them, in which case I declined. It is true that the next referee they find may be less competent, or fail to disclose their knowledge of the author. But I made a choice to play by the rule despite that.
If editors find out that this doesn’t work, and they can’t find enough good referees, then they can change their policies. It’s not my call.
If there is a subliterature such that, as a default, referees can always identify authors because they’re their friends, that is bad for anyone new trying to publish in that subliterature, who will immediately be recognized as not one of the referee’s friends. Maybe the response is that no one else ever tries to publish in this subfield. Then, one might start to wonder about the value of a subfield such that only a small ring of friends see the point in writing about it. Maybe the reason that things keep getting published in it is not that the papers are important and publishable, but, well… that the referees are all each other’s friends. (Not to mention future referees.)
Even if this is not the case, and the literature is genuinely important and valuable, the point stands that the fact that refereeing within it is not anonymous makes it so that it doesn’t really need to be in order for everyone to get published. You’re not facing one of the major professional pressures that the rest of us face. Maybe this is just unavoidable when the literature is small enough — all the same, worth acknowledging.
Maybe everyone in these publication circles is, as Recently Promoted says, laughing at everyone who is not. Let me just remark that this imbalance of professional pressures seems obviously bad, and if I were benefiting from it, I wouldn’t see it as something to brag about.
@Take Heart,
Thanks! That’s a great perspective and I’m going to adopt it. Much appreciated.
I think we all know what professional ethics demands in this situation. Do the right thing, folks.
I do some work in a small subfield where everyone knows what everyone is working on. When I am asked to referee, I either know the identitiy of the author because I have heard the paper as a talk before or I have 1-2 names in mind as to who it may be. In the second case, I (obviously?) agree to referee – it’s just a guess after all and I am sometimes wrong, e.g. it’s actually an early career philosopher writing in this subfield for the first time. In the first case, I was advised by senior colleagues to write to the journal editor and point out that I know the author’s identitiy, and say whether I think this would be an obstacle to fair assessment. Then let the editor decide. I honestly think this is how others in the subfield operates – no googling at any point.
I wonder whether Recently Promoted’s views on anonymous review carry over to anonymous blog comments. Would they be fine with the moderators revealing their name so that we can reward them for being a good person who rewards good people?
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