2 thoughts on “The future of blind review in an online world

  1. Curt Rice

    Having recently taken on (partial) editorial responsibility for Linguistic Inquiry squibs recently, I’ve found myself having to confront a closely related issue. LI in general does not use blind review, i.e. papers are sent for review with the author’s name visible to the reviewers. The identity of reviewers, however, is not necessarily revealed to the author.

    Somewhere along the way, the squibs section was modified to allow authors to choose whether or not they would like their squib submission to be reviewed blindly or not.

    As I’ve been trying to develop my own position on this practice, the reality described in the discussion Eric points us to is of course relevant. That is, to what extent does any journal anymore actually have blind reviews, given the internet, etc?

    I don’t have much in the way of conclusions to offer on this, but I am very interested in hearing the perspectives of others. I have found that the situation influences me as an editor in at least one important way, and that is that I prefer not to use relatively “young” scholars as reviewers for papers by senior people, because it seems to be difficult for them to be critical at the appropriate level; given the rejection rate we have to maintain, careful critique by reviewers is essential.

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