Case for the double-blind peer review

TL;DR

This paper argues that double-blind peer review reduces biases related to gender, seniority, and location, offering a fairer evaluation process without significant drawbacks.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review supporting double-blind review as an effective method to mitigate reviewer biases in scholarly publishing.

Findings

Double-blind review reduces gender bias.

Double-blind review minimizes seniority bias.

Survey indicates no significant downsides to double-blind review.

Abstract

Peer review is a process designed to produce a fair assessment of research quality before the publication of scholarly work in a journal. Demographics, nepotism, and seniority have been all shown to affect reviewer behavior suggesting the most common, single-blind review method (or the less common open review method) might be biased. A survey of current research indicates that double-blind review offers a solution to many biases stemming from author's gender, seniority, or location without imposing any significant downsides.