| 1 | Oct 6, 2011 4:30 PM | On one paper, an author had told me of his intention to submit. On another, I guessed that the author list might have some intersection with that of a previous paper; in fact it was the same list. On two papers, seeing that there was just one author enabled me to guess who it was. I would say that the number of authors and of institutions needs to be hidden. |
| 2 | Oct 6, 2011 4:00 PM | In one case (paper (number redacted)), when reading the paper I felt that the level of notational complexity indicated that at least one of the authors was (nationality redacted) possibly (name redacted). It turned out to be true. |
| 3 | Oct 6, 2011 10:50 AM | There was one more where I did not guess but it wasn't a surprise upon reveal. |
| 4 | Oct 6, 2011 9:53 AM | The two papers whose authors I guessed were very easy to guess the authors of. I didn't try to guess the authors of the third paper I was assigned. |
| 5 | Oct 6, 2011 9:51 AM | I was actually only right about the institution on one of those. The other was impossible to disguise. |
| 6 | Oct 6, 2011 8:47 AM | I personally knew the (single) author of one of the papers and still was quite surprised at the identity. |
| 7 | Oct 6, 2011 8:43 AM | I reviewed 6 papers.
3 of the papers I reviewed fall into category A. The other 3 papers I reviewed don't fall into categories B, C or D.
For 2 papers, I knew who the authors were because I'd seen them give
talks on the material.
For 1 paper, I didn't know who the authors were, but I guessed correctly.
For 1 paper, I didn't know who the authors were, guessed that they
were in some relatively small set of likely suspects (e.g. one of the
5 guys in the world who are experts on topic X), but did not guess
anything more specific than that, and I was right.
For 1 paper, I discovered the authors' identities while googling for
related work, because the authors published a draft of their paper on
their web page (which also contained the related work). At that time,
I had not even bothered to guess the identities of the authors.
For 1 paper, I didn't know who the authors were, and didn't have any
guess, but was not surprised when I found out who they were. |
| 8 | Oct 6, 2011 8:36 AM | I don't think author anonymity helped much; since the authors names were revealed after the review was submitted and knowing, the final decision on whether to accept or reject a paper was still potentially influenced by knowing who wrote the paper. |
| 9 | Oct 6, 2011 5:47 AM | I often do a quick google search to check for related work and novelty; this often revealed the authors to me very quickly.
Anecdote: There were two submissions by authors whose work I generally respect. I might have approached the submissions more positively if I had known who they were. But that would have been a waste of my time, because actually the submissions weren't very good. |
| 10 | Oct 5, 2011 1:59 PM | "guessed authors and were right" => guessed subset of authors correctly |
| 11 | Oct 5, 2011 1:43 PM | By correct guesses, I really meant that I guessed one of the authors on each paper --- I still don't know who are the rest of the authors. |
| 12 | Oct 5, 2011 1:15 PM | For 4/5 papers, I guessed the most senior author but not the junior authors. (One of those turned out to have a mild conflict with me.) For the last paper, I had no idea. In hindsight, not that surprising, but I wouldn't have guessed even if I had tried. |
| 13 | Oct 5, 2011 12:59 PM | In each case where I guessed the authors, I only guessed some of the authors and were right that they were some of the authors. |
| 14 | Oct 5, 2011 12:03 PM | B. Authors were other people from the same research group. |
| 15 | Oct 5, 2011 11:47 AM | Among the 3 papers I had to review (ERC member), I partly guessed some of the authors of 1 paper because they cited explictly "their" tool and went on to decribe an extension; in other words, they didn't really fully anonimize their paper but I think this is fine and shouldn't/wasn't being held against them (that paper ended up being rejected for other reasons). |
| 16 | Oct 5, 2011 11:23 AM | I entered keywords of the title into google scholar for checking
related work and (more or less immediately) hit into the authors.
I do not consider blinding as useful. |
| 17 | Oct 5, 2011 10:44 AM | (a co-reviewer, name redacted)) correctly "guessed" some of the authors, but that was only due to previous conversations with one of them. |
| 18 | Oct 5, 2011 10:41 AM | When I say I guessed the authors, I mean, I guessed that one of the authors was a particular faculty member that I knew was working on the project that the paper centered around. In each case there were additional student authors that I made no attempt to guess at. |
| 19 | Oct 5, 2011 10:35 AM | I have one paper where I did not guess the authors, but I knew the authors (and 50-50 chance I would have listed them among the possible candidates if I'd tried to make such a list, I guess). |