Editors are biased too: An extension of Fox et al. (2023)'s analysis makes the case for triple-blind review

Abstract

Functional Ecology conducted a randomised trial comparing single- and double-blind peer review; a recent analysis of this data found substantial evidence for bias by reviewers. We show that this dataset can also be analysed for editor bias, after controlling for both reviewer bias and paper quality. Our analysis shows that editors tend to be more likely to invite high-scoring manuscripts for revision or resubmission when the first author is a man from a country with a very high Human Development Index (HDI); first authors who were women or not from very high HDI countries were more likely to be rejected at this stage. We propose that journals consider a triple-blind review process where neither editors nor reviewers know the identity of authors, and authors do not know the identity of reviewers nor editors. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.