Monday, January 29, 2018

How do I know how good it is, if I don't know who wrote it?

When a paper is submitted for publication, the editors send it out for expert opinions. The first time I was asked for my opinion about a computer science paper, I blurted out "How am I supposed to know how good it is, if I don't know who wrote it?" 

From that, I realized how crucially my judgment of the work depended on my opinion of who did it.

I was accustomed to refereeing mathematics papers, where the authors' names are revealed to the referees. But computer science often has double-blind reviewing, where the reviewers don't know the identities of the authors. It took me awhile to get used to this. I found that I was trying to guess the authors' identities. But that lessened as I've learned how often my guesses are wrong!

I wonder how much our opinions of the work are shaped by what we learn from seeing the authors' names.