Effect on the Quality of Peer Review of Blinding Reviewers and Asking Them to Sign Their Reports

Abstract

There is little evidence from this study to support changing current practice by blinding or unmasking to improve the quality of reviews. Blinding or unmasking might, however, have other advantages in the peer review process, such as ensuring that the review process is seen to be fair. In view of the difference between the results of this study and previous research, it is not possible to generalize from this study to other settings, particularly the many biomedical journals that are more specialized. Further research should encompass a wide variety of different types and sizes of journals.

Editorial: CORR ® Will Change to Double-blind Peer Review—What Took Us So Long to Get There?

“…For obvious reasons, it is not easy to conduct true experimental studies on this topic, and the few experiments that have been done by and large were either underpowered [5] or have focused on whether blinding influences the quality of the review [6,8] rather than its result. The scant evidence we have on the latter point suggests that blinding makes little difference in manuscript disposition [12].…”

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“…On average, each reviewer only observed 2 of the 8 errors. Of the reviewers, 33 % suggested to accept the article with only minor changes, while only 30 % advised to reject it (Godlee et al 1998). Reviewers naturally bring their own confirmation bias.…”

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