The Philosophers' Cocoon

A safe and supportive forum for philosophers.

Owned & Moderated by Marcus Arvan (University of Tampa)

Contact: marvan@ut.edu

Blog mission & moderation policy

IMPORTANT NOTE on how to ensure anonymity in commenting
Job-Market Reporting Thread (2025-26)
Job-Market Discussion Thread (2025-26)

recent posts

about

Single- vs. double- & triple-anonymized journals?

In our new "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Do you know philosophy journals reviewed in single-anonymized or identities-visible models? Recently I saw an established philosophy journal published by Springer say in its submission guidelines that its peer review process is single anonymized.

According to the accompanying taxonomy file available at https://osf.io/we82n
Single anonymized means Reviewer masked to author, author visible to reviewer, reviewer and author visible to (decision-making) editor;
Double anonymized: Reviewer masked to author, author masked to reviewer, reviewer and author visible to (decision-making) editor;
Triple anonymized: Reviewer masked to author, author masked to reviewer, reviewer & author masked to (decision-making) editor;
All identities visible: Reviewer visible to author, author visible to reviewer, reviewer
and author visible to (decision-making) editor.

Since most philosophy journals seem to be Double or Triple anonymized, I am curious about philosophy journals reviewed in single-anonymized or identities-visible models. Do you know good philosophy journals adopt these models? What are the differences between the four models? Identities-visible model seems interesting because reviewers know that authors will know their identities, and so they tend to write the reports in much more responsible ways. But what about single-anonymized review? Reviewers know the identities of authors, but authors does not know the identities of reviewers, shall this model produce more responsible reports?

I've received many 100 to 200 word reports with very biased, or deeply disrespectful and irrelevant, or even shameless and wrong comments from philosophy journals that adopt Double or Triple anonymized review models.

Interesting questions. I was surprised to learn a number of years ago that in some scientific fields, single-anonymized review (authors' identities being visible to reviewers) is pretty much the norm. I didn't ever learn why that is exactly, but from what I gathered the results of the process did seem to be pretty biased in favor of well-placed researchers ("name" researchers at prestigious institutions/programs). Obviously, triple-anonymized review is supposed to be the best process for preventing biases like these–and I suspect most readers of the Cocoon are likely to favor triple-anonymity over the others–but as the OP notes there may be other tradeoffs.

What do readers think? 

Posted in ,

4 responses to “Single- vs. double- & triple-anonymized journals?”

  1. Brad

    I publish in a few fields including philosophy of science, scientometrics, and sociology of science. The key journals in scientometrics – the field dedicated to quantitative studies of science – uses only single-blind review. I have found referees there (with one except), generally fair. But the nature of the work lends itself to objective evaluations (in a way that philosophy may not). Whether a paper constitutes a contribution is quite straightforward, and it is generally straightforward assessing methods and selection of data. Many scientific fields use single-blind, and some of my colleagues in math claim that they would not even be able to evaluate a paper without knowing who the author is.

    Reply
  2. Interesting

    @Brad what you said about your colleagues in math is interesting. Do you know why they feel this way?

    Reply
  3. Faster

    From what I’ve seen, journals with triple-blind review are sometimes faster with the review process because the editors can choose to be reviewers themselves. This saves the time of searching for one of the referees, and the editor may sometimes write their referee report based on the screening reading (for desk-rejection) which saves the time of the additional read.

    Reply
  4. Brad

    Interesting,
    First, proofs in math papers are not like deductive proofs in which each step is explicitly laid out such that a machine could “follow” or “execute” it (see https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-018-1778-8). Consequently, I am told, when refereeing a math paper it helps to know who the author is as it aids in understanding how one bridges the gaps. One can infer from past work what they are assuming. I hope this helps. My math colleagues take a very long time to work through a paper they are refereeing. I can referee a philosophy paper quite quickly – if I agree to referee a paper, I am usually done within three days (often less).

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The Philosophers' Cocoon

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading