
Scientific publications should be anonymous - fitzwatermellow
http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05382
======
golemotron
It's amazing that none of the commenters so far seem to acknowledge that
competition for prestige is one of the forces that fuels research. Take that
away people will be less aggressive about pursuing and investing their time in
valuable areas of inquiry.

There are downsides to competition but there are considerable upsides also.
The bet we make in our culture is that the upsides outweigh the downsides, and
based on history it seems to be true.

~~~
zepolen
I think making publications anonymous when initially published and add names
later would work.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
there's been work on writing stylometry, namely detecting authors by style of
writing. Now academic papers might be a combination of enough authors that the
results are not easily classifiable, but still, just stripping author names is
not enough.

~~~
tjl
You can also tell quite a bit based upon the citations. I've been able to
guess at who was the original author based on how the paper was
written/structured and the citations.

~~~
isolate
You can also guess who writes reviews. There was this one guy who got pissed
off at me at a conference for nonchalantly discussing who I thought the
reviewers on our paper were... whatever man, it's my review now.

------
shoyer
This is a hilariously bad idea.

As the author notes, there is no way to make conference presentations
anonymous. But the problem is much bigger than that. Even most informal
conversations between scientists involve promoting and discussing one's own
ideas and work.

How could hiring or awards work? It is simply not possible to make such
decisions on meritocratic basis without individual credit for ideas. The only
consistent way I could see that working is to make such applications
anonymous, but at a certain point anonymity will inevitably break, if only for
in-person interviews or once people are actually hired.

More broadly, complete anonymity is impossible, and incomplete attempts
towards anonymity would only reinforce existing old-boys networks within
science. Authorship would become a matter of gossip and innuendo, which would
make it even harder for new-comers to break into science.

~~~
igravious
You may be right. This may be a hilariously bad idea.

But if you are right then it is a shame that you are right. What is the goal
of science? Shall we say truth? But what are the goals of scientists? You can
say that it is truth, but perhaps it is fame/prestige/success, call it what
you will. And what about ever-present human bias? And what about
discrimination based on ethnicity or gender. I'm no bleeding heart, I assure
you, but these things are real.

Humans have spent most of our evolutionary lives not being scientists. The
suggestion to render part of the scientific process anonymous to mitigate the
our human failings, though idealistic, is an _admirable_ idea. That this
admirable idea may also be a hilariously bad idea is sad really.

You know what? It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Another commenter here
wonders what it would be like if we could flip a switch and make the process
of scientific discover both anonymous and wiki-based. But why should it be all
or nothing? How about a scientific enclave (or more than one!) that adhered to
these principles? Well it turns out that at least in mathematics there are
precedents! Bourbaki[0] was the pseudonym of a collective if I'm not mistaken
and nCatLab[1] is a wiki-lab for collaborative revisable work in math,
physics, and philosophy.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki)

[1]
[https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage)

~~~
contravariant
I don't entirely agree with your arguments that anonymity would be a good
thing. Or even that it's sad that we can't have it. Although I do agree that
it's helpful in some situations.

You say anonymity would prevent people pursuing science purely for fame.
However first of all, science is a hilariously difficult area to become famous
in. And secondly, wanting to be recognised by your peers is not in and of
itself bad, if it causes someone to pursue science then it might even be
considered admirable.

I think discrimination against authors is a lot more worrying, but the
situation is better than it once was since it is now no longer possible to
prevent someone from publishing their work. If nobody would read it if they
knew who the author was, or if it's conclusion is so outrageous that it might
damage the author's reputation, it's also possible to use a pseudonym.

I vehemently disagree that it's a sad reality that we can't have full
anonymity. A scientific process that is completely anonymous is either
unnecessary or if it's necessary then that would be very _very_ sad.

~~~
dalke
"science is a hilariously difficult area to become famous in"

There's fame, like Einstein had, and there's fame like how everyone in your
specific field knows who you are. For a comparison, there's "president of the
United States" but there's also "Mayor of Albuquerque".

The former is very hard to get. The latter, more common, and more achievable.

Here's an example of how anonymity would hurt. A lot of pharmaceutical
research is done in industry. While some of the research is kept proprietary,
especially early on, other parts are published. It's a lot of work to publish.
It may include talking with company lawyers so that confidential information
isn't revealed. Why might someone go through this extra effort?

One factor, of course, is the altruistic goal of advancing science. Another
factor is the more egocentric desire to finally be able to tell others - who
are often friends - the cool things you've been working on. A third is the
knowledge that layoffs come, and a paper is a form of advertisement for future
employment.

The latter two disappear if all publications were anonymous.

------
jmount
With anonymous publications special interest groups can drop an unlimited
number of publications without exposing their network of shills. So while the
proposal might help with some things (which I doubt), it makes others worse.

~~~
nickff
If the 'shills' are wrong, then the peer review should take care of them.

The whole problem that this proposal is trying to eliminate is a combined
problem of discrimination (for various reasons) and cargo-cult/groupthink;
calling someone a 'shill' is an example of at least the first of these issues.

If the peer review process cannot successfully refute claims in a paper, and
has to resort to name-calling, that is a sign that the reviewers are either
incompetent or lazy (, and that there may be fundamental flaws in the peer
review system).

~~~
kwhitefoot
> and that there may be fundamental flaws in the peer review system

There are.

One problem is that there are too many papers to be reviewed, another is that
the papers generally do not include complete datasets. Also, where large
volumes of data are involved it is common to perform computational
transformations on that data to extract something; the source code and build
process are not always described in such a way as to make the executable
reproducible.

And those are just some of the problems with peer review, others include more
human problems such as insufficient remuneration for the reviewer, reviewers
who have too much at stake to give an unbiased review (whether too positive or
too negative), too few reviewers with the necessary expertise, etc.

Even with competent and committed reviewers the system is flawed;
unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any alternative.

~~~
nickff
I agree with your description of other problems with the current system, and
think that anonymizing authorship will serve to force them to be solved. Many
popular journals currently look at the author's position and previous works to
filter out the unpopular and/or unprestigious authors; anonymization would
eliminate the bias against young, innovative, and/or unconventional
scientists, and force the journals to improve their process.

------
plg
In our previous work, Anonymous et al. (2002, Nature), Anonymous et al. (2003,
Science), Anonymous et al. (2009, Cell), we established the validity of our
approach and we outline the details of our methodology necessary to repeat
these kinds of experiments. Here we use this approach to address a novel
question, ...

~~~
d0mine
Could you elaborate what is your point?

For example, if 2000 scientists (that may or may not work together) use
"Anonymous et al." name then how anything inside an article will make someone
choose a particular scientist's papers from a list of papers in a journal?

Obviously, if you're reading an article; you may recognize the work (science
is very specialized: if you understand the article; you'll probably recognize
the author (the group) even if all references/names are removed anyway -- but
you need to read the article).

The suggestion doesn't remove all bias but it can remove some. There is no
silver bullet that would make people rational.

~~~
Pyxl101
The authors in their paper propose a different approach to citing articles,
which is to cite the article name instead of the author. This criticism, while
humorous, is off-base from what's actually being proposed.

This is not an example that the authors gave, but you might write something
like "On the Origin of Species (1859)" instead.

This joke also misses the point in that a follow-up anonymous article would
not, to match the author's intent, reference the authorship of previous work.
The whole point is for each article to stand on its own, so referencing
yourself pseudonymously as the author of a previous article does not achieve
the goal.

I don't want to be "that guy" who takes the humor too seriously, but I worry
from the comments so far that people will conflate the humor and the actual
proposal. The overall aim and proposal of the article is to find a way for
papers to be judged individually on their own merits, rather than on the
merits of their author, the author's institution, the author's nationality, or
the paper it was published in. This is a worthwhile goal even if we cannot see
a serious means by which to achieve it.

To be fair to the jokes, while reading the article I was unsure if it was
satire. I'm still not completely sure. I believe the authors are sincere in
their belief in anonymity as promoting merit, but I remain unsure whether they
think their proposal is realistic, and whether or not they are making some
kind of meta-point about the state of scientific review by observing how far
away the current review process is from one that would be (as best as we can
make it) unbiased. That is to say, upon reading the paper, the idea of
implementing their anonymity proposal seems ridiculous - and this realization
may be partly the point of the paper, to get the reader to realize how many
different points in the editorial process depend on the author's identity
rather than the material's merit. It does not strike me as satire, because the
work takes itself seriously, but it may seem like satire because of how large
the gap is from where we are to a meritorious review system.

"Ha! It would be ridiculous for work to be reviewed, published, and promoted
purely on its own merit, rather than based on the legacy of the author."

On the other hand, it's hard to say how well a fully anonymous system would
work. Human biases often serve a useful cognitive function in allowing some
filtering operation to be performed more efficiently, albeit with less
accuracy. A random lunatic who claims to have invented a perpetual motion
machine is likely to be wrong. It's possible that devoting equal review time
to all claims and all papers would lower the sum value of scientific output.
If the volume of scientific material is too great to comprehensively review,
from any given observer's standpoint, then a system that relies on identity as
a heuristic and is slightly less meritorious may be strictly better than an
anonymous system that is slightly more meritorious, for example. Society might
have a different goal for the output of the scientific process, which is to
maximize the discovery/promotion/publication of useful scientific output - and
that is a different goal than judging individual work fairly.

------
mynegation
In a twist of irony, this paper itself is not anonymous.

Jokes aside, while many suggestions and rationale for them make sense, I
wonder how it is going to be implemented in practice. Many scientific areas
are narrow enough for people "in the know" to figure out who the author is.

I use authors' names all the time to see what else they published, if I need
some more information on the topic.

It may be useful to enforce anonymity for the submission process but once
accepted, publish it with names.

~~~
nickff
> _' In a twist of irony, this paper itself is not anonymous.'_

How is this ironic? If anything, it might be seen as poignant.[1]

[1] [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irony](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/irony)

~~~
marvy
Poignant? I half-suspect you're trolling. It's ironic because one might assume
that a paper that argues for anonymity to itself be anonymous, but it's not.
Irony: when things are the opposite of what's expected.

------
grahar64
It is really useful to know the authors because if you come across a
researcher who has been looking at the same types of problems as you, then you
read all their previous work to gain much better context of the domain. Plus
then you look at all the coauthors and look at their work, and you can find
some really interesting vein of knowledge that way.

~~~
an_ko
That seems more a criticism of search engines than of anonymous publishing.
What you need is a search engine that can find similar work. Being written by
the author is just a heuristic in a search for something different, even if
probably helpful.

~~~
dalke
"A sufficiently advanced search engine" should be the new "sufficiently
advanced compiler."

I'll give an example of how difficult that is. I am researching the historical
development of graph canonicalization for chemical information. I have bits
and pieces from published papers, but did those people work together or
independently?

The papers include institutions, so I know two of the people (Gluck and
Morgan) worked together at DuPont before Morgan went to the Chemical Abstract
Service. The latter then cites a presentation Mooers gave at an American
Mathematical Society meeting in 1958.

But what was the relationship or key insight from Mooers?

A key detail came from an autobiographical essay from 2001 at
[http://www.asis.org/History/12-lynch.pdf](http://www.asis.org/History/12-lynch.pdf)
, which contains the following:

> I was party to a conversation in which Harry Morgan [CAS] and Calvin Mooers
> discussed the issue of a canonical connection table. Mooers, in the light of
> the counter-example raised against the work of Dave Gluck, suggested a
> permutational approach to the design of an algorithm, which would overcome
> the objections. Harry Morgan (1965) then devised the method that bears his
> name and that has been a keystone in chemoinformatics since that time.

That reveals a closer connection than seen in the papers. But what was this
counter-example?

I then read
[http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=ht...](http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0460819)
which says:

> The presentation of counterexamples, such as the arbitrarily numbered planar
> graph in Figure 5 devised by Dr. Lehman of the Walter Reed Army Institute of
> Research, have necessitated revisions to canonical ordering techniques such
> as those used by DuPont and the Chemical Abstracts Service.

And there is it - the counter-example. But notice the use of institutional
names, not published papers?

How is a search engine supposed to make those connections?

I can totally understand the argument that people should be referring to
unique names, instead of a choice of names, to make this sort of thing easier
for mechanized search. But that's not how people work. Why are they using
institutional names? Because those components, like canonicalization, are part
of a much larger system, which is more coupled to the institution than a
single person.

Hence why there's this marvelous publication (for a historian) which is a
survey of the chemical information systems in the US in the early 1960s.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=B0ArAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA172&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=B0ArAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA172&ots=TP5X6xlSJM&dq=survey%20of%20chemical%20notation%20systems&hl=de&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q&f=false)
. Indexed by institutions and people.

Take away the latter, anonymize everything to just published papers, and the
structure for understanding things collapses.

~~~
phreeza
> How is a search engine supposed to make those connections?

I can't tell you how exactly, but if current word embeddings can do stuff like
"Paris - France + England = London", I don't see why future systems shouldn't
be able to resolve the relationships between institutions, people and
publications you mention, in a similar fashion. I am not saying that it will
be easy, your example requires much more "one-shot learning", but I could in
principle see how an automated system might do it.

------
dalke
One positive reform for transparency in medical research is the requirement to
register clinical trials. Quoting from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trials_registry#Creat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trials_registry#Creation_and_development)
:

> For many years, scientists and others have worried about reporting biases
> such that negative or null results from initiated clinical trials may be
> less likely to be published than positive results, thus skewing the
> literature and our understanding of how well interventions work.[2] This
> worry has been international and written about for over 50 years.[3] One of
> the proposals to address this potential bias was a comprehensive register of
> initiated clinical trials that would inform the public which trials had been
> started.[4] Ethical issues were those that seemed to interest the public
> most, as trialists (including those with potential commercial gain)
> benefited from those who enrolled in trials, but were not required to “give
> back,” telling the public what they had learned.

> Those who were particularly concerned by the double standard were systematic
> reviewers, those who summarize what is known from clinical trials. If the
> literature is skewed, then the results of a systematic review are also
> likely to be skewed, possibly favoring the test intervention when in fact
> the accumulated data do not show this, if all data were made public.

This is public information, and (quoting
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClinicalTrials.gov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClinicalTrials.gov)
) "A 2013 study analyzing 8907 interventional trials registered in
ClinicalTrials.gov found that 23.2% of trials had abstract-linked result
articles and 7.3% of trials had registry-linked articles. "

To be truly anonymous would mean hiding this link, which would be a backwards
step.

------
rubidium
I need to be blunt on this. This is just not gonna happen. As nice as it may
sound. It's like wishing for world peace.

Time and energy is better spent choosing specific issues to solve the issues
the paper brought up. A universal band-aid of "just get rid of the author
names" won't fly.

Talk to any academic. You'll find a few sympathetic ears, but for the most
part it's the way it's been for 300+ years.

------
rsfern
There are some interesting points here, but I don't think the author
adequately addresses research funding transparency concerns. Many funding
sources require researchers to include a grant number in any publication. This
would effectively deanonymize at least the Principal Investigator and their
work related to the grant, since that is public information.

On top of that, many fields are small communities, and everyone knows what
everyone else is working on and which methods they use.

------
jrapdx3
Anonymous publication is in all probability impractical, but the concept also
has serious flaws. Identifying authorship is important not only to give credit
(or blame) where it's due, but also for historical reasons, to know how
research developed among particular threads in a given disciplines.

Naming authors is necessary to verify results, e.g., when authors admit to
faking results (not a rarity), other articles by those authors are suspect as
they should be. Publishing anonymously makes it hard or even impossible to
know the legitimacy of reports especially as time since publication gets
longer.

While anonymous publication is highly unlikely to happen, IMO there are a few
things that would materially improve the process. I think _peer review_ and
perhaps editing itself _should be_ done anonymously. That way much of the
"politics" is eliminated because anonymous review would have to accept/reject
a manuscript _only on its merit_. In line with principles of full disclosure,
an accepted paper would be published under its authors' names.

It might also help to reduce political pressures associated with publishing.
One change to consider is encouraging reports of research findings or results,
but discouraging premature "conclusions", i.e., when effectively authors'
speculations. In many fields data is lacking or inadequate to support
conclusions, it's hard to say what data mean until there's enough such that
clear patterns emerge. Constraining the urge to be the first to reach a
conclusion could reduce unnecessary competitiveness in research communities.

Contributing to the community is important in science, but contribution has a
value that needs to be recognized or rewarded if we are to see it continue.
Publishing a scientific report is an accomplishment to be proud of, certainly
not selfish to enjoy being known for having done something worthy.

------
ufo
Even anonymous papers aren't fully anonymous. Not only are any mentions of
previous work a dead giveaway, but knowing the topic lets you narrow down to
the research groups are currently working on the issue. Not to mention writing
style. If your field is small enough you might be able to identify the writer
just by his mannerisms.

------
bluenose69
If names and affiliations are hidden, how will applicants to graduate school
find potential supervisors?

~~~
marvy
Psychic powers?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
If science could get those to work, the idea would pay for itself...

More seriously - science isn't just about papers. There are also conferences,
conference proceedings, books, institutes, funding programs, research labs,
industry collaborations, and awards.

Anonymity makes all of those hard to do.

~~~
marvy
Conversely, those all make anonymity hard to do. As in, somewhere between
impractical and impossible.

------
geofft
How do you find good researchers to hire and get them through the tenure
process?

The trouble here is that opportunistic anonymity is not enough. You need
_guaranteed_ anonymity, that even if someone tries to leak information about
the connection between a researcher and their work (intentionally or
unintentionally), it won't work. Otherwise social pressure will be in favor of
those leaks: e.g. faculty who do hiring will take their knowledge of what
researchers are really working on in account when they look at researchers to
collaborate with.

And I don't see a tractable way to achieve guaranteed anonymity.

------
ftwynn
My academic wife's impression of the idea is that while eliminating bad
heuristics can be good, there are also good heuristics that come with name
recognition.

In particular, it's often difficult in social science to know if the research
methods were _really_ done correctly. More prestigious authors tend to be more
rigorous than unknown authors.

So the point of eliminating as many bad heuristics as possible (regardless of
how feasible it actually is) might throw out a size-able chunk of the baby
with the bathwater.

------
joshvm
Double blind reviewing is mentioned, but is glossed over as "not ready yet".
This is what we should be focused on improving. The big problem seems to be
that editors have more oversight than the reviewers and can see who the
authors are.

Most of the top journals and conferences already enforce double blind
reviewing, so in principle nobody knows who anyone is. The submission
requirements ask that you do not reference yourself directly in your work so
that the reviewers can't infer anything.

On the other hand it's often obvious who a submission is from if you know the
people in the field, so that goes out of the window. This also doesn't stop
political rejection, where the reviewer has an interest in the research and
claims "Oh this has already been done".

I also have no doubt that certain big names in academia would kick up a huge
fuss if their work was rejected.

> However, the speaker should choose a sufficiently different title from her
> publication.

What's the point of that? So I give a talk, I have to come up with a different
name for my work and then when I tell people "You can read about it in my
paper here" I've given the game away. Or do I have to make everyone play hide
and seek trying to guess which paper is mine?

------
potatote
This (anonymity) is impossible in my opinion. Research projects can be so
focused/narrow that anyone who is following the conference proceedings/papers
could narrow down at least some of contributing authors in some papers fairly
easily.

------
breezest
Biases arise if people are allowed to cite other papers even when the
publications are made anonymous. The importance of a paper can be estimated
from their citations. For example, an important work cites another ground-
breaking work. Besides, novel research idea and topic is rare and serves as a
signature to the authors and their affiliations. Because researchers often
verbally share their research results with others (through the internet),
every people will recognize them and their works finally.

My feeling is that as long as the whole open system makes scientific progress,
and suppresses malicious or false scientific results, it is fine.

------
js8
So let me get this straight. In order for attribution (credit to researchers)
to work correctly, we should require them to publish anonymously?

I don't think there is a free lunch here. Either you are using publication
record to determine who should get paid or tenure, and then you will have
problems with bias, or you are not doing that, and then the authorship of the
papers doesn't really matter too much.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
The author can have a list of papers (verified by journals) that he has
published. He can show the list to the hiring/tenure committee.

~~~
nickff
The author or journal could also provide a cryptographic means of verifying
the identity of the author.

~~~
fixermark
It'd have to be the author.

Otherwise, we're putting a lot of trust in journals as the gatekeepers of the
true identities of their content creators. That seems like a fine opportunity
for corruption.

------
bloaf
I agree, and I also think science should be done on something closer to a wiki
than a PDF.

Unfortunately, there is no switch to flip that can make this happen. Making
the change would require a cultural shift across a majority of scientific
disciplines, and the cultural leaders are the ones who are being accused of
benefiting from the status quo.

~~~
micwawa
Of course, but this is people's lives and careers. If you've spent 60 hours a
week for the last 40 years on something you aren't about to hand it over to
some randomer on a wiki.

~~~
bloaf
That is precisely the cultural shift I am talking about. If you are doing
science, the thing you spend 60 hours a week doing should be "trying to
understand the world better." Once you have achieved some new understanding,
you should want to share that understanding with others.

What you're talking about are things like pride and profit, stubbornness and
renown. My point was that the current science culture is currently as much
about fame and pride as it is about understanding. In order to have any sort
of anonymized, wiki-based science, we would need to ask people who have become
famous and respected by doing things one way to start over in a new way.

------
neutronicus
There's a reason that "first authors" are also called "corresponding authors".

It's so that you can get in touch with them if you have questions or, more
critically, if you want to collaborate with them.

