Comments on: Blogs for the Boys

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:12:15 +0000

If I remember correctly from my time as a copy editor at a bio. journal: People would often ask that X, a rival in the field, not review their work. This wasn’t entirely because they thought “X hates my work,” but because they didn’t want X to find out what they were up to.

By: Tom T.

Tom T. — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 00:52:35 +0000

Setting aside any question of outright recusal, is there (or should there be) an expectation that a reviewer will disclose any personal connections to the reviewee?

By: Neel Krishnaswami

Neel Krishnaswami — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 23:41:55 +0000

If conflict of interest worries you that much, you could always start advocating Robin Hanson-style “idea markets”. Presumably, if the sums involved are large enough, the lure of material gain will induce people to give new ideas a fair shake, even if they come from co-bloggers. :)

By: Harry

Harry — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 14:17:11 +0000

Jacob suspects that most of the Timberites have never met each other—in fact I suspect that despite my general taciturn-ness I have met more of them than any other (Micah, Chris, and Jon—any advance on 3?). I think that co-blogging is an irrelevance—I’d feel much better about refereeing stuff by any co-blogger (including Chris, whom I know best) than by many other people with whom I have no formal connections, but whom I know better. I think the ethics of refereeing stuff by people you attended grad school with are much more complicated. I say that as someone who didn’t go to a fancy grad school, so have very few classmates around in the profession. I’d be amazed if my stuff has ever been refereed by a classmate. It seems to me that having classmates referee your stuff is one of the biggest advanatages of going to a fancy grad school. (I’m not complaining, just observing). BTW, Ethics, the best journal in my field, is very explicit in asking referees NOT to decline to referee a paper just on the grounds that they recognise the paper or know the author.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 09:26:59 +0000

There’s a fairly big assumption in that last post…

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:02:17 +0000

Presumably if there was a group blog of mathematicians, they’d address this problem by all having sexual relationships with one another, thus reducing the problem to one already solved.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 06:40:13 +0000

Yeah, that’s part of what I was saying when I wrote “I doubt that there’s some additional mechanism that would allow you to free the reviewing process from the social networks it’s embedded in. Editors rely on these networks to find competent reviewers in the first place”

By: Angry Bear

Angry Bear — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 06:34:35 +0000

economics journals reveal the author’s name to the referee. Even so, due to the citations, you can frequently not help knowing whose paper you are refereeing. If not the citations, then you’ve seen the paper in a conference or seminar—I’m not sure there’s a good way around this, other than to have uninformed referees. AB [sorry if this was posted twice]

By: chs

chs — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 05:02:13 +0000

Interesting…