My colleague Emery Berger recently pointed me to the paper Single versus Double Blind Reviewing at WSDM 2017. This paper describes the results of a controlled experiment to test the impact of hiding authors’ identities during parts of the peer review process. The authors of the experiment—PC Chairs of the 2017 Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM’17) conference—examined the reviewing behavior of two sets of reviewers for the same papers submitted to the conference. They found that author identities were highly significant factors in a reviewer’s decision to recommend the paper be accepted to the conference. Both the fame of an author and the author’s affiliation were influential. Interestingly, whether the paper had a female author or not was not significant in recommendation decisions. [Update: a different look at the data found a penalty for female authors; see addendum to this post.]
Fairness is blind
I find this study very interesting, and incredibly useful. Many people I have talked to have suggested that we scientifically compare single- with double-blind reviewing (SBR vs. DBR, for short). A common idea is to run one version of a conference as DBR and compare its outcomes to a past version of the conference that used SBR. The problem with this approach is that both the papers under review and the people reviewing them would change between conference iterations. These are potentially huge confounding factors. While the WSDM’17 study is not perfect, it gets past some of these big issues.
In the rest of the post I will summarize the details of the WSDM’17 study and offer some thoughts about its strengths and weaknesses. I think we should attempt more studies like this for other conferences. Continue reading