On Thu, 15 Nov 2001, Thomas Richardson wrote: > On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Alexander Dekhtyar wrote: > > > I would like to stress this point. Double-blind reviewing will be > > ineffective in hiding the identity of the authors in relatively small > > communities where the reviewers would most likely have heard of the > > previous work of the authors. > > It might be argued that in small communities double-blind reviewing is > more necessary since such communities are likely to be less accustomed to > seeing papers written by "outsiders".
However this does not address the problem that in small communities the reviewers would most likely be familiar with the work of the authors "within" the community and less familiar with the work of "outsiders". Thus, double-blind reviewing still does not blur the line between "insiders" and "outsiders". In order for it to work, there really has to be a high probability that the reviewer is not familiar with the previous work of the authors on similar topics. This is achievable in one of two situations: - large communities; - smaller communities that use "outsiders" as reviewers. > > Double blind reviewing also somewhat disfavors papers that are followups > > of previously published work by the same researchers as no longer > > the "in our previous work we did ..." references are acceptable. Replacing > > with with "A and B did ... We extend this work ..." sometimes does not do > > enough to hide the identity of the authors. > > Again, this is arguable. If the paper is not worth publishing on its own > merits, but only as a follow-up (appendix?) "follow-up" != "appendix". You somewhat misunderstood what I meant. In many situations, an author would write an publish paper A which introduces a particular framework, and then would write an submit paper B which would show some advanced (and original !) result within the framework from paper A. From personal experience, one of our submissions for double blind review included experimental results that were obtained by modifying and using the software the we have previously wrote and described in a different paper. To cover for that, we had to include the phrase about "software kindly provided to us by the authors ...", which clearly could not (did not ?) fool anyone. Alex -- -------------------------------X---------------------------------- Alexander Dekhtyar (859) 257 1839 (phone) Assistant Professor (859) 323 1971 (fax) Department of Computer Science University of Kentucky [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cs.uky.edu/~dekhtyar -------------------------------X----------------------------------
