A paper signed by a Nobel Prize winner and a paper signed by an unknown author, which one would you prefer to publish as a reviewer? According to a paper preprint , author names have a huge impact on reviewers. For more objective results, the study supports double anonymity for peer review—reviewer identities are kept secret from paper authors, and paper authorship identities are kept secret from reviewers. The paper’s author, Stefan Palan, is co-editor of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, which employs mandatory double-anonymous peer review. Palan asked Nobel laureate Vernon Smith if he was writing a paper and if he would like to participate in the experiment. Smith submitted a paper jointly signed by the two. Palan and colleagues invited more than 3,000 people to review the manuscript, revealing the identity of one of the named authors to some and not at all to others. The results showed that the approval rate for disclosing the Nobel laureate’s identity increased from 29% to 36%. The disclosure of the author’s identity also directly affects the reviewer’s opinion: when the reviewer learns that the Nobel Prize winner is the author, the recommendation of the reviewer to directly accept the paper or make a slight revision soars from 10% to 59%.
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