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Enter any anecdotes with respect to author identity (to amplify your previous answer)
#Response DateResponse Text
1Oct 6, 2011 4:30 PMOn 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.
2Oct 6, 2011 4:00 PMIn 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.
3Oct 6, 2011 10:50 AMThere was one more where I did not guess but it wasn't a surprise upon reveal.
4Oct 6, 2011 9:53 AMThe 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.
5Oct 6, 2011 9:51 AMI was actually only right about the institution on one of those. The other was impossible to disguise.
6Oct 6, 2011 8:47 AMI personally knew the (single) author of one of the papers and still was quite surprised at the identity.
7Oct 6, 2011 8:43 AMI 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.
8Oct 6, 2011 8:36 AMI 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.
9Oct 6, 2011 5:47 AMI 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.
10Oct 5, 2011 1:59 PM"guessed authors and were right" => guessed subset of authors correctly
11Oct 5, 2011 1:43 PMBy 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.
12Oct 5, 2011 1:15 PMFor 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.
13Oct 5, 2011 12:59 PMIn each case where I guessed the authors, I only guessed some of the authors and were right that they were some of the authors.
14Oct 5, 2011 12:03 PMB. Authors were other people from the same research group.
15Oct 5, 2011 11:47 AMAmong 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).
16Oct 5, 2011 11:23 AMI 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.
17Oct 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.
18Oct 5, 2011 10:41 AMWhen 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.
19Oct 5, 2011 10:35 AMI 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).