
Should scientific papers be anonymous? - tokenadult
http://www.statnews.com/2015/12/30/should-scientific-papers-be-anonymous/
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rubidium
At the root of this proposal is the fantasy that scientists would somehow be
selfless adherents to the alter of the scientific method. They give up all
honor, pride and recognition so that the "scientific method" be protected from
the often selfish desires of human beings.

In the real world, having names on papers is a really good thing. In real
academia, I've heard professors say "well that work was done by so-and-so, and
they're bad researchers so I don't trust their results".

There's this popular misconception that just because something is published in
a peer-reviewed journal that it must be true. Nobody in research actually
believes that. All it means is the authors were able to convince the reviewers
and the peer reviewers to publish it.

~~~
api
What if papers were cryptographically signed so that they can be claimed later
and there were a period of, say, one year of anonymity after publication? This
period would allow things like peer review and initial recognition of the
paper to occur with less social bias.

Just as important would be institutional anonymity. A paper from Nowheresville
should be considered equally to a paper from Harvard.

Finally I think papers should be required in their headings to disclose
sources of funding for the work therein, although this would have to be done
later so as not to indirectly compromise the anonymity period.

~~~
rubidium
What problem are you trying solve? As bad as problems as the academic
community has (it has lots!!), names on papers is not one of them.

Science is the organic collection of all people and resources and knowledge
engaged in figuring out how our world works. Having blind papers would mean I
would just have to spend an extra 10 minutes reading each paper to figure out
what group wrote it.

The fact that Prof. Ivy League gets her results recognized more easily then
Prof. Nowhereville is, actually, an ok system. Because Prof. Ivy is more
likely to be pursuing interesting problems to the rest of the scientific
community, she's more likely to be trusted by other scientists to be a good
scientist (i.e. not careless), and the system supports people who have "made
it" through the academic gauntlet.

If Prof. Nowhereville actually finds something interesting, pursues
publication, passes peer review, and it gets published then great. His results
are probably worth the attention of the scientific community. But the fact
that the barriers are higher is ok, because he hasn't proven himself to be as
trustworthy.

~~~
jessriedel
> What problem are you trying solve?

I think this is ultimately a manifestation of "scientific deontology ethics",
a fantasy that we should approach each paper with identical, non-prejudicial
priors and evaluate it on its own merits. (It is the scientific analog to the
reductio ad absurdum of maximum non-prejudice in human affairs, where one
never considers any background about a person before dealing with them.) This
position only seem tenable to those who haven't yet had to wade through the
morass of terrible and misleading result in the literature.

In other words, this sort of idea is not a consequentialist attempt to solve a
problem, it's a deotological attempt to stop unfairness.

~~~
jeffbr13
Every new scientist having to learn the heuristics to judge a high-quality
paper from its metadata seems like a local maxima in fighting spam, and
something that makes the profession harder to get into.

The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new
papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions, which seems like a
better way to filter poor-quality human-written content (we're not talking
about email spam here). Plus, by making the process explicit and visible, it'd
be easier for an outsider to engage with new scientific literature too.

Perhaps that's an approach we could use in software development. It's mostly
how I use HN or Reddit -- I read plenty of comments, and only ever look at the
name if the comment provokes interest in the writer's background.

~~~
jessriedel
> The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge
> new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions

I think you've got it backwards. _First_ make the good tools, then stop using
the bad ones. You don't force people to develop good Bayesian spam filters by
banning whitelists. Rather, the Bayesian spam filters get invented, then
people are _happy_ to stop using whitelists.

Likewise, scientists would love nothing more than to have the tools that
enable a transparent frictionless utopia free to barriers to entry. They'd get
access to a few new ideas caught in the spam filter! But we don't get there by
anonymizing papers. That would just lead (almost instantly!) to good
scientists whispering in the ears of their colleagues about which papers they
just published, or to take a look at that new paper by so-and-so, etc. (And
then the only people who could access the metadata would be those who are
already at good institutions!)

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Fomite
One of the journals in my field requires you to strip out all identifiers
before submission. This is _remarkably_ difficult. Consider the things that
might give you away:

\- GitHub, FigShare, institutional repositories etc. for code and data

\- Information on the location of the study

\- Statistical packages used (hope you didn't author the one you're using)

Of course, anonymity will be shattered the moment anyone talks about their
work at a conference. Furthermore, several systematic reviews and meta-
analysis studies I've worked on benefitted greatly from being able to email
the authors directly with questions.

I'd also be concerned that people will mentally assign things to a "Big Name"
in the field _anyway_. "Ah, another paper on HAART. Must be out of so-and-so's
lab..."

~~~
tibbon
Sure- you can absolutely figure out who wrote the paper given enough work.
Yet, I really do like the idea of _first_ the paper being reviewed on it's own
merit/ideas/findings, and _then_ potentially people seeing who was involved as
a secondary thing at some later point after judgements had already been made.

~~~
Fomite
I really like double-blind peer review.

This was more a note that, when the paper is accepted, those identifying
things _go back in_. The proposal to have papers be anonymous would have to
leave them back out, stripping the paper of important context, and making open
science a bigger pain than it already is. Which is kinda contrary to the goal.

~~~
scott_s
I have submitted several papers for double-blind peer review. (I work in the
systems side of computer science.) My rule is that I will not weaken a paper
through the double-blind process - that is, even if saying this paper builds
on prior work _may_ give enough information to out me or my co-authors, I
still do it. I still say what system we used, and say it builds on previous
work, but I pretend that that work was done by someone else.

In practice, someone who really wants to break the double-blind veil probably
can. But I don't think that's a problem, as very few people are _consciously_
biased, and will actively seek out such identifying information. By removing
names and affiliations, and pretending all of our work was done by someone
else, I think that's enough to help people avoid _unconscious_ bias.

------
peter303
Anyone good enough to peer review would probably know who did it. Research
areas are often not that large.

~~~
MikeNomad
Yes. When I was doing peer review work in my field (Mass Com), it took about a
year to get the landscape sorted. That includes being able to ID people behind
submissions, based on writing style.

Unfortunately, I saw submissions get down voted not because of the content,
but because of some long standing intellectual feud (I found this out after I
became a sought-after "tie breaker." The journal editors figured out I was
indeed casting votes based solely on the submission in hand).

------
clarkmoody
The landscape of incentives within scientific publishing is complicated. You
have to map out what drives each of the parties: journals, authors, reviewers,
readers.

Journals want high-quality submissions from well-known authors in order to
maintain the brand. They also want ongoing subscription fees.

Authors want to be published in good journals, but they also want raw
publication count to be high. So the primary incentive may not be intellectual
honesty.

Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're
reviewing, hence the term _peer-review_. They have an incentive to prevent
publication of competing work.

Readers want all knowledge to be free, so they have an incentive to _not_ pay
for journals. They also want to know which works are important and which are
crock, so name-recognition comes into play.

I've probably left something out, but you get the idea. Coming up with new
ideas is fun, but until you align the incentives, nothing meaningful will
happen. And you've got hundreds of years of inertia and thousands of careers
in the balance.

~~~
digbyloftus
"Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're
reviewing, hence the term peer-review. They have an incentive to prevent
publication of competing work."

This seems backwards to me. There isn't a fixed amount of interest in a field
that is captured by peers. If others in your industry are getting attention
then it draws attention to your industry as a whole. I'd think reviewers would
be biased towards having competing work published not against.

~~~
clarkmoody
In some fields, there is extreme pressure to be "first to publish" specific
results, and sometimes multiple labs are working on the exact same problem. In
this case, if the "peer" is with a competing lab, they are faced with the
unethical decision of rejecting the paper in favor of their lab. Or even
worse, of stealing the results and trying to publish first.

------
rwj
While I'm not sure about the complete anonymity suggested by Hanel, I do wish
that journals would move to double-blind reviews. It would not be perfect, as
often research know enough to guess who the authors might be, but it would
still reduce bias.

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cryoshon
Wouldn't work. Gotta justify getting your grants by being able to point to
previously published work.

Plus, everyone can tell who did what-- if not exactly who, then one of a small
(5-10) group of people who are likely in the same geographical location.

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ninguem2
How would one decide who gets tenure, promotion and raises if all papers are
anonymous? Once universal basic income is implemented, maybe. Meanwhile, no.

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amelius
No, but it would be nice if we had a place where we could discuss scientific
papers anonymously. Of course, to keep things concentrated, it would be nice
if there was exactly one such place.

~~~
darkmighty
I've always wanted arXiv to fill that role.

I understand though that simple anonymous comments don't cut it. It can
devolve into youtube comments quickly -- personal attacks to the authors, low
effort comments, spamming, "trolling", etc.

Those sites need a private reputation system: you can vote comments but the
commentator is anonymous; it's hidden reputation should help sorting the
comments.

~~~
fdej
A stackexchange site with an automatically posted "question" for each arxiv
submission would be an interesting idea.

------
steinsgate
I think the main issue here is the problem of bias in the scientific
community. Anonymity is just one proposed solution. There could be others.

We should remember that there are three major forms of incentive in the
scientific community :

1\. Prestige (requires name) 2\. Salary and grants (requires credentials, and
hence names) 3\. The joy of analysis and discovery (doesn't require names)

(I might have missed some forms of incentives, but these seem to be the major
ones to me.)

Anonymity will take the top two incentives away. The second one is a very
practical one. There's an existing competition for salary and grants, a pretty
brutal one in some areas where money is scarce. We need to solve this problem
first before the concept of anonymity can be realistically entertained.

I have heard other proposals for reducing bias that seem more tangible. One of
them is democratization (partially or fully) of peer review in a centralized
publication system (like arxiv).

------
ddingus
No.

Peer review can apply the scientific method to the paper well enough. This may
take time. That is just fine.

People having their names on papers helps with motivation to publish in most
cases, and it's good to understand who contributed what when trying to
understand how an idea has formed and who might be with collaborating or
talking to.

Some topics may be difficult politically. Those are special cases that can and
should warrant doing whatever it takes to insure publication and the safety of
the scientist.

There are also ethics. Anon publishing may well increase questionable
research. This should fall into the special case bucket too, as it overlaps
with politics.

------
mynegation
Previous discussion on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762409)

~~~
tokenadult
That previous discussion is of a different article by a different author, but,
yes, this issue deserves a lot of discussion. The article submitted to open
this thread is by two authors who follow the research literature on this topic
closely and who review much of the prior literature in their commentary
article.

~~~
scott_s
A different article, yes, but I think the currently submitted one is a
reaction to the linked one. I was going to link to the previous discussion,
too, as I think this discussion and that one are necessarily related.

Which makes me think maybe HN should have some mechanism to say "This article
is related to this other one", and point to the HN submission for it.

~~~
tokenadult
_Which makes me think maybe HN should have some mechanism to say "This article
is related to this other one", and point to the HN submission for it._

I guess our user comments here in this subthread are that mechanism. By the
way, this whole thread is an implementation of the new HN algorithm that
revives threads that are missed on first submission and gain upvotes later. I
notice that is implemented by resetting the submission date on the submission.
(I was the original submitter, so I remember when I first submitted this
thread.)

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smikhanov
It sounds like a good idea for the topics that are highly skewed by the
political agenda. Like global warming.

Imagine a situation when some climatologist makes a discovery that global
warming is a fluke. In the current political climate no reputable journal will
accept his article on this topic. Moreover, no scientist will even SUBMIT one
because of the possible damages to his reputation.

On the condition of anonymity, it may stand a chance.

~~~
bitwize
They could do what Satoshi and Bourbaki did: submit pseudonymously.

~~~
wolfgke
For many (all?) journals, you have sign a consent to publish form. As soon as
you sign it, your anonymity is over.

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skynetv2
Simple solution is to have blind and double blind reviews. People write papers
not only for the greater good but also to improve their careers and profiles.
Because thats the only way to get more funding to do more work.

By mandating blind reviews, the bias can be removed easily.

There are many who give good/bad reviews just by looking at the authors names,
not everyone of course.

I am not sure why blind reviews are not mandatory by now

------
adeptus
Better idea: Submit it anonymously with your public PKI hash. Then wait X
years (5?) and optionally announce yourself by signing the hash to prove you
are the author. That way, enough time is given to have the content unbiasedly
considered, yet you still get to take credit a bit later.

------
dekhn
The correct term is not anonymized, but de-identified.

This wouldn't work in almost any field because the community can already tell
with high accuracy who the peer reviewers are, and it's usually easy to tell
who wrote a paper by the language style and the conclusions.

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jpambrun
Ironically, none of the authors were selfless enough to submit anonymously.

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platz
Should political actions be anonymous? Judicial rulings? Why _not_ anonymize
everything we take part in?

