https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03256-9 Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Advertisement Advertisement Nature * View all journals * Search * My Account Login * Explore content * About the journal * Publish with us * Subscribe * Sign up for alerts * RSS feed 1. nature 2. career news 3. article * CAREER NEWS * 11 October 2022 Authors' names have 'astonishing' influence on peer reviewers A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance, finds study. * Nicola Jones^0 1. Nicola Jones 1. Nicola Jones is a freelance writer in Pemberton, British Columbia. View author publications You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar * Twitter * Facebook * Email You have full access to this article via your institution. Download PDF Caption: Plaster head with eyes covered red satin ribbon on blue background. When the identities of peer reviewers and authors are hidden from one other, bias in the review is less likely.Credit: Adapted from Getty Imagine you receive a paper to review for a journal, and the author's name jumps out at you as that of a Nobel prizewinner. Would you be more inclined to recommend the paper for publication than if, say, the author was a novice? Research published in September says yes: by a factor of six^1. "That's huge," says study author Stefan Palan at the University of Graz in Austria. "Everyone expected an effect. But the size of the effect is really astonishing." Palan's study on 'status bias' supports the idea that double-anonymized peer review -- in which reviewers' identities are kept hidden from the authors, and vice versa -- produces more objective results. "I think double blind is the way to go," says Palan, a finance researcher who serves as co-editor of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, which uses mandatory double-anonymized review. Increasing numbers of studies have examined the practice of peer review in recent years, unravelling issues such as gender bias (in which male authors receive higher acceptance rates than do female authors) and status bias (in which higher-profile authors get a boost), across different types of review. [d41586-022] Careers Collection: Publishing The most common review method used by science journals is single-anonymized, in which reviewers' names remain unknown to authors. At Wiley, for example, one of the largest publishing companies worldwide, 62% of 1,500-plus journals use single-anonymized review, whereas just 37% use double-anonymized (the remaining 1% use a model known as triple-anonymized, in which reviewers are anonymous and the authors' identities are unknown both to the reviewers and to the handling journal editor). The standard practice differs from one discipline to another: those with vibrant preprint cultures, such as physics, tend to be more open, whereas social-sciences and health journals often favour greater anonymity. Double-anonymized review can be logistically hard to implement, concedes Palan: authors often accidentally give themselves away in a study; reviewers can often guess at author identities or find the paper in a Google search; and enforcement can add expensive layers of work for the editors. But a second study, released in August -- which confirms the impact of status bias in a sample of more than 150,000 papers -- suggests that the positive impacts of double-anonymized review can be achieved simply by recommending the approach to authors, rather than enforcing a system^2. Although the scale of the impact is smaller with an optional system than with a mandatory one, the price tag is much lower. "Double-blind peer review is something I would advocate for," says lead author Inna Smirnova, an information researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. [d41586-022] If you can't be kind in peer review, be neutral Ironically, both studies appear on SSRN (formerly the Social Science Research Network), a non-peer-reviewed venue that helps academics to quickly disseminate early-stage research. Both works have also been submitted to peer-reviewed journals, but the preprints make the possibility of double-anonymized review less feasible. "It is becoming more and more common to publish preprints in the field of social sciences," says Smirnova. "The field's norms are shifting and we tag along." Acceptance test As a journal editor, Palan wanted to check on the impact of double-anonymized review in his journal. He approached Nobel prizewinner Vernon Smith to see whether he had a paper in the works and would be willing to participate in an experiment. Smith, an economist at Chapman University in Orange, California, and his colleague Sabiou Inoua, an early-career economist at that university, submitted a paper. For the test, Palan and his colleagues invited more than 3,000 people to review the paper, sometimes revealing one or other of the two authors' names, and sometimes revealing neither. The name that was stamped on the paper affected whether people were willing to review it or not: invitation acceptance rates climbed from 29% when the junior author's name was revealed to 36% when the laureate's name was disclosed. [d41586-022] Why early-career researchers should step up to the peer-review plate More importantly, knowledge of authorship markedly affected the reviewers' opinions of the paper. Ignorance of the Nobel laureate's authorship boosted recommended rejection rates nearly threefold, from 23% (when the laureate's name was revealed) to 65% (when the little-known author's name was revealed). Advice to accept the paper outright, or with minor revisions, skyrocketed sixfold -- from 10% to 59% -- when Smith's authorship was declared. "I knew intuitively that Vernon and I would not suffer the same rejection rates from reviewers, but not a gap of this extent," says Inoua. Their paper is now undergoing revisions -- based on the daunting mass of more than 600 pages of reviewer comments, rather than the usual page or three from a couple of reviewers. Knowledge of the high status of a paper's author might justifiably influence a reviewer's opinion: it could boost their willingness to accept a counterintuitive result, for example, on the basis of the author's track record of rigour. But Palan's study found that reviewers' opinions changed across all six of the measures they were asked about, including the subject's worthiness, the novelty of the information and whether the conclusions were supported. These things should not all be affected by knowledge of authorship, Palan argues. A previous study had suggested that single-anonymized reviews are worse than double-anonymized ones at excluding poor-quality works from publication, implying that double-anonymized decisions are 'better' for science^3. Marginal boost To check whether a mandatory system of double-anonymized review is necessary to reduce status bias, Smirnova and her colleagues looked at papers submitted to 57 journals published by IOP Publishing, a subsidiary of the Institute of Physics; the publisher announced in November 2020 that it would be phasing in optional double-anonymized review. The team found that anonymization increased the acceptance rate for low-prestige authors by 5.6%, while lowering acceptance rates for high-prestige authors by 2.2%. This increase, Smirnova says, could help "marginalized groups of authors who often struggle to have their work see the world". The researchers checked to see whether the policy created unwanted effects -- such as a reduction in the number of people willing to review the papers, or a new bias against papers whose authors had been anonymized. The team found no such effects, suggesting that optional double-anonymized review has few downsides. [d41586-022] Working Scientist podcast: How the academic paper is evolving in the 21st century Despite these benefits, few authors tend to take up the option. In the IOP Publishing study, little more than one-fifth of researchers chose to remain anonymous when making submissions after double-anonymized review was introduced. Nature Portfolio, of which Nature is a part, adopted optional double-anonymized review across its family of journals in 2015 -- but just 12% of authors who submitted papers between 2015 and 2017 chose this route^4. Smirnova hopes that her team's work will "inspire more shift". Another option that is becoming increasingly popular, including at Nature, is transparent review, in which reviews are made public. A further model, besides triple-anonymized, is open review -- in which everyone's identity is public. Each method has benefits and pitfalls. "Blinding the peer-review process has its own merits: less bias," says Hassan Murad, a clinical epidemiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who studies evidence generation and synthesis. Having examined literature on peer review^5, Murad says that the new results fall in line with what he would expect. "But, of course, there are cons," he adds. Those include an increased risk that fabrication or fraud might go undetected. But nothing is perfect, he adds. "I don't think there is a system without bias." "It's the worst system except for all the others," jokes Palan about double-anonymized review. "I think it has a lot of flaws, but I don't see a better system. The others have more flaws." doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03256-9 References 1. Huber, J. et al. Preprint at SSRN https://doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.4190976 (2022). 2. Smirnova, I., Romero, D. M. & Teplitskiy, M. Preprint at SSRN https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4190623 (2022). 3. Sun, M., Danfa, J. B. & Teplitskiy, M. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 73, 811-819 (2022). Article Google Scholar 4. McGillivray, B. & De Ranieri, E. Res. Integr. Peer Rev. 3, 5 (2018). PubMed Article Google Scholar 5. Haffar, S., Bazerbachi, F. & Murad, M. H. Mayo Clin. Proc. 94, 670-676 (2019). 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Download PDF Related Articles * [d41586-022] Why early-career researchers should step up to the peer-review plate * [d41586-022] If you can't be kind in peer review, be neutral * [d41586-022] Working Scientist podcast: How the academic paper is evolving in the 21st century Subjects * Careers * Publishing * Authorship Advertisement Sign up to Nature Briefing An essential round-up of science news, opinion and analysis, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Email address [ ] [ ] Yes! Sign me up to receive the daily Nature Briefing email. I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Nature and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy. Sign up * Close Nature Briefing Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter -- what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Email address [ ] Sign up [ ] I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Nature and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy. 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