Viewpoint effectiveness of anonymization in double-blind review

Abstract

P of process the perform EER the flaws REV academic I but it. E of W Evidence can the I S a humans be cornerstone publication subject suggests who to subconscious biases influence one's ability to objectively evaluate work: In a controlled experiment with two disjoint program committees, the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'17) found that reviewers with author information were 1.76x more likely to recommend acceptance of papers from famous authors, and 1.67x more likely to recommend acceptance of papers from top institutions.6 A study of three years of the Evolution of Languages conference (2012, 2014, and 2016) found that, when reviewers knew author identities, review scores for papers with male-first authors were 19% higher, and for papers with female-first authors 4% lower.4 In a medical discipline, U.S. reviewers were more likely to recommend acceptance of papers from U.S.-based institutions.2.