🚀 go-pugleaf

brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:

>The shock is that you would have even considered the opposite. It is
>exceedingly rare for a referee to give his name. Ever. And referee
>reports are NEVER published. 

Again, having served as a referee, as a graduate student for a very
well published professor, and having had prospective papers reviewed,
there is often a chinese wall between the author and the reviewer.  Face
it, in most academic disciplines the editor tends to send articles to
referees knowledgeable in that area, and quite often they are well-known
to the original author.  I've been present when my professor, in reading
the reviewers report, recognized both the writing style and the viewpoints
of several reviewers.  (And later discussed the comments with them at a 
conference where they freely acknowledged being the reviewers.)  The
author is generally supposed to be anonymous to the reviewers, but that
is seldom actually the case.  (The simple rule is to count the number
of papers cited.  The author is often the most cited source.)

The question of publishing the reviews, or of the reviewer contacting the
author are potentially significant issues.  A mechanism which permits the
reviewer to contact the author directly while maintaining anonymity should
not be all that difficult to implement via a relay service maintained by
the moderator of c.s.r.  (I see virtually no way to ensure that the author
is anonymous to the reviewers, though.)

I'm not sure about the desirability of 'publishing' the reviews yet, but
I could see either method (publishing or not publishing) having value.

My cynical side has always suspected that the REAL reason why the comments
of the reviewers are not published is that it gives them an excuse to
write another article.  (Publish or perish, after all!)  I'm not totally
sure of that 'NEVER', though, because I think I've seen excerpts of reviews
in the New England Journal of Medicine editorials.

Michael Nolan
nolan@helios.unl.edu