Charles Fox, Jennifer Meyer, Emilie Aimé
This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be found here.
There is substantial evidence that systemic biases influence the scholarly peer review process, such as biases against women, or against researchers from developing countries. To reduce these biases, many scholars have advocated for double-blind peer review (also known as double-anonymous review), in which author identities are anonymized before review (this is called “double-blind” because reviewers are also anonymous to authors). However, the effectiveness of double‐blind review in eliminating biases is uncertain. Few randomized trials have manipulated blinding of author identities for journal submissions, and those that have are generally small or provide few insights on how blinding influences reviewer biases.
In 2019, Functional Ecology began a large randomized trial, using real manuscript submissions, to evaluate the various consequences of double-blind peer review. Research papers submitted to the journal were randomly assigned to two groups; half were reviewed with author identities blinded to reviewers (double‐blind review) and the other half were reviewed with authors identified to reviewers (single-blind review). In each case, reviewers were anonymous unless they chose to sign their review. Papers reviewed double-blind were on average less successful in the peer review process; they received lower ratings from reviewers and were less likely to be invited for revision or resubmission. However, the effect of review treatment varied with author location. When author identities were known to reviewers, papers with first authors residing in higher-income countries (those with a higher human development index; HDI) and those residing in countries with a higher average English-proficiency fared better compared to papers by authors from countries with a lower HDI and lower English-proficiency. When author identifies were not known to reviewers the outcomes of peer review (review scores and editor decisions) were similar between demographic groups. Blinding author identities had no effect on gender differences in reviewer ratings or editor decisions.
Our data provide strong evidence that authors from higher income and/or English-speaking countries receive significant benefits (a large positive bias) to being identified to reviewers during the peer review process, and that anonymizing author-identities (e.g., double-blind review) reduces this bias, making the peer review process more equitable. We suggest that offering optional blinding of author identities, as some journals allow, is unlikely to substantially reduce the biases that exist because authors from higher-income and English-speaking countries are the least likely to choose to be reviewed with their identity anonymized.
Functional Ecology: Plain Language Summaries 