Moving to triple-anonymous review!
July 8, 2011 § 4 Comments
I’m secretary to the Analysis Trust, and would like to report that the committee members and editors recently revised the paper reviewing processes at Analysis. The new policy is as described on the website:
“We practise triple anonymity: the Editor receives the submissions in anonymous form, as do referees, and authors are not informed of the identity of referees.
A proportion of papers are sent on to referees, and all accepted papers will have been refereed.”
Given what we know about bias in the review process, I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a commendable step. I hope this encourages more women to submit papers to the journal!
What We're Doing About What It's Like 
[…] moving to a triple-anonymous review process. This decision was made because the committee became concerned about the potential for implicit bias […]
Awesome. Now, how to get more journals to do it this way?
Do authors generally know the identity of their reviewers?
In practice, in theory, the identity of the reviewer is not made known by the editor. However, about half of the ‘anonymous’ reviews I’ve received (as an author) included pointed self-identifying remarks by the reviewer so that I would know who it is. Sometimes this is because they want me to know why they are experts, sometimes they want me to read their works and cite them, and sometimes it is a wee bit of an intimidation move. Once or twice I think it was intended as a friendly wink, but on every occasion I just really wished they hadn’t self-identified!