Horror stories about anonmous peer review

Henry Farrell links to a Chronicle of Higher Education story by Jeffrey Young about how Microsoft Word’s tags have eroded anonymity in peer review. Henry adds: Word documents preserve a lot of metadata, including, very often, the author?s name ? so that if you submit your review via a Word email attachment (as many journals ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Henry Farrell links to a Chronicle of Higher Education story by Jeffrey Young about how Microsoft Word's tags have eroded anonymity in peer review. Henry adds: Word documents preserve a lot of metadata, including, very often, the author?s name ? so that if you submit your review via a Word email attachment (as many journals ask you to these days), and the journal forwards the review unchanged to the article?s author, he or she can figure out who you are without having to play the usual guessing game. I?ve been aware of this for a couple of years (I carefully strip all data before sending reviews out, just in case) ? but I suspect that many academics aren?t (some of them may not even realize that Word collates this data automatically). I've been outed once as a reviewer after I rejected a piece, but it was not due to anything as high-tech as MS Word metadata. I faxed the journal -- which shall remain nameless -- my review. The journal then faxed it to the paper-writer -- who shall also remain nameless. The problem was that the journal's fax to the writer contained my department's fax number and identification -- and from there it was pretty damn easy to identify the referee. Here's a link for potential referees about how to stay anonymous if you electronically submit your referee reports.

Henry Farrell links to a Chronicle of Higher Education story by Jeffrey Young about how Microsoft Word’s tags have eroded anonymity in peer review. Henry adds:

Word documents preserve a lot of metadata, including, very often, the author?s name ? so that if you submit your review via a Word email attachment (as many journals ask you to these days), and the journal forwards the review unchanged to the article?s author, he or she can figure out who you are without having to play the usual guessing game. I?ve been aware of this for a couple of years (I carefully strip all data before sending reviews out, just in case) ? but I suspect that many academics aren?t (some of them may not even realize that Word collates this data automatically).

I’ve been outed once as a reviewer after I rejected a piece, but it was not due to anything as high-tech as MS Word metadata. I faxed the journal — which shall remain nameless — my review. The journal then faxed it to the paper-writer — who shall also remain nameless. The problem was that the journal’s fax to the writer contained my department’s fax number and identification — and from there it was pretty damn easy to identify the referee. Here’s a link for potential referees about how to stay anonymous if you electronically submit your referee reports.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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