Hi Fred, I'll go public on this one. This happened to me. I will not reveal who reviewed my paper and which paper it was only that your naive assumption might not always be correct. I have learned my lesson and exclude people with overlapping interests (even though they actually might be the best critical reviewers for your work). Unfortunately you don't really have control if the journal still decides to pick those excluded reviewers. As a suggestion to people out there, make sure to not encrypt your comments as pdf and PW protect them - that's how I found out about the identity of the reviewer - as it couldn't be changed by the journal.
I agree though that it shouldn't happen and I hope it only happens in very few cases. Jürgen On Apr 3, 2012, at 9:10 AM, Dyda wrote: I think the argument that this may give a competitive advantage to the referee who him or herself maybe working on the same thing should be mute, as I thought article refereeing was supposed to be a confidential process. Breaching this would be a serious ethical violation. In my experience, before agreeing to review, we see the abstract, I was always thought that I was supposed to decline if there is a potential conflict with my own work. Perhaps naively, but I always assumed that everyone acts like this. ...................... Jürgen Bosch Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute 615 North Wolfe Street, W8708 Baltimore, MD 21205 Office: +1-410-614-4742 Lab: +1-410-614-4894 Fax: +1-410-955-2926 http://web.mac.com/bosch_lab/
