Re: editorial policy question

lrudolph@xxxxxxxxx (Lee Rudolph) writes:

Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

drmwecker@xxxxxxxxx writes:

Most of the better journals use double-blind refereeing, so, in
practice, it should not come about that either of reviewer and editor
knows the other party.

Thanks for pointing that out. You mean "reviewer and author", I assume.

I question strongly that "most of the better journals use double-blind
refereeing" (if "better journals" refers to mathematics journals). I
know of *no* mathematics journal that presently keeps the referee
blind to the author (there were some experiments along those lines
about 30 years ago, which failed and were stopped). I admit to never
having refereed for the Annals, but I've refereed for other journals
that seem to me to be among "the better", and never been blinded to
the author. Perhaps drmwecker could give explicit examples of such
journals.

I was wondering about that too. Double-blind is fairly common in
philosophy, but not in computer science. CS researchers too often
need to refer to their own past work and this gives pretty clear clues
to who wrote what.

This can also be a problem in philosophy, of course, but in general,
it's easier for the philosopher to write about a topic without setting
the context to include his previous work.

Mathematics is, I'd think, more like computer science than philosophy
in this regard. New work has to be put in context of old work and due
to specialization, the author's previous work will be
over-represented.

--
Jesse F. Hughes
"Mathematicians who read proofs of my results seem to basically lose
some part of themselves, like it rips at their souls, and they are no
longer quite right in the head." -- James S. Harris, Geek Cthulhu
.

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